
Qass I 1^ ^ J> M 
Book^ l i-^f . 



BOOKS BY PRICE COLLIER 

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



England and the English . . . . ne^ $1.50 
The West in the East . {postage extra) net 1.50 



THE WEST IN THE EAST 

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW 



THE WEST IN THE EAST 

FROM 

AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW 



BY 

PRICE COLLIER 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
NEW YORK : : : : 1912 



Jisros 
.^1 



Copyright, 1911, by 
Charles Scribner's Sons 



Published May, 1911 



/z 



Co 
MY WIFE, KATHARINE 

TO WHOSE SOUND CRITICISM AND KINDLY PEELING A 

RECENT VOLUME OWES THE QUALITIES FOR 

WHICH IT WAS CHIEFLY COMMENDED 



INTRODUCTION 

Much ridicule is dealt out to the author who 
writes of a people, and a country, which he has 
visited for only a short time. On the other 
hand, it is the universal and sound opinion that 
the history of an individual, or of a nation, can 
only be written impartially by one who stands 
apart, and at a distance, and whose impressions 
and opinions are not smothered by details or 
prejudices. 

''My wanderings in the East have been spread 
over ten years, but what one gains in insight 
during a long stay one loses in the power of con- 
veying. The most illuminating books on India 
have been written by people who pass through 
seeing everything with a fresh eye," writes Ed- 
mund Candler; and what he writes of India 
might well be supported by the evidence of such 
writings as those of Ford, De Amicis, Dawson, 
Hammerton, and others. 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

This IS not by way of being a defence of my 
own audacity in this and other volumes, but 
an explanation. 

I imagine that a writer who knew the Rev. 
Mr. Skeat's dictionary by heart would cease to 
write, and die of verbal suffocation. He would 
know so much of words, that he would deem 
them too dangerous to handle. A little knowl- 
edge may be a dangerous thing, but too much 
knowledge is often exile from activity. They 
were right in the Garden of Eden. 

A year's travel may mean many years of pre- 
liminary study, steadied and corrected by ob- 
servation. I permit myself to say as much for 
the following pages. 

I regret that the list of the names of those 
who, by their friendliness and hospitality, have 
made even these slight sketches in the East 
either possible or profitable is too long to give. 
I might be accused, too, of gilding the frame of 
my picture over much. Edward Fitzgerald was 
much bored one evening in the smoking-room 
of a certain house in the country by the familiar 
talk about people of title. He said good-night 
and left the room. A few minutes later he put 
his head in at the door, holding his candle in his 



INTRODUCTION ix 

hand, and said in a solemn voice: '*I knew a 
lord once, but he is dead now!" I should be 
sorry to offer such another opportunity at my 
study door. 

Fortunately, those who gave me letters, and 
those who honored them, and many hosts be- 
sides, are not of a class who look to the mention 
of their names for the assurance of my feeling 
of gratitude and indebtedness. The book, such 
as it is, is theirs, and with it go my apologies to 
them for its un worthiness. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I. On the Way to the East . . 1 

II. The Gateway to India ... 46 

III. The Great Mughal .... 92 

IV. From Mughal to Briton . . 135 
V. Religion and Caste in India . 192 

VI. His Highness the Maharaja . 240 

VII. BuNiA— Pani 288 

VIII. A Visitor's Diary 321 

IX. John Chinaman and Others . 365 

X. Japan 409 

XI. Things Japanese, Korean, and 

Manchurian 463 

Conclusion 518 



THE WEST IN THE EAST 

I 

ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 

IT was less than a century ago that the sar- 
castic question, "Who reads an American 
book ?" was posed in the Edinburgh Review. 
The Review was young, light-hearted, and care- 
less of the feelings of others in those days. When 
it was about to be issued, Sydney Smith sug- 
gested as an appropriate motto the line from 
Virgil: Tenui Musavi meditamur avena, trans- 
lating it: "We cultivate literature on a little 
oatmeal!" 

Nor Sydney Smith, nor any other Englishman 
at that time, dreamed that well within the cen- 
tury two books at any rate, by American au- 
thors, dealing directly with the British Empire, 
would be given a prominent place in the library 
of every serious-minded Englishman. Captain 
Mahan, of the United States Navy, and Mr. 
Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard Univer- 
sity, have written volumes that no Englishman 
cares to neglect. 

1 



2 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

What was playful condescension when the 
question, "Who reads an American book?" was 
asked, has become a criticism of English patriot- 
ism to-day, for no Englishman may pass by these 
two books when he studies his own empire. 

This marks a great change, but it is a change 
that is often misunderstood. These books were 
not written to instruct, or to counsel, the Eng- 
lishman about his own affairs, but to serve as 
commentaries for Americans, in the study of 
their own internal and external affairs. There 
is no suggestion of the smallest labial lapse in 
the grandmotherly method with eggs, on the 
contrary, it is a study of the old method, not a 
hint that there exists a better of which we are 
the inventors. 

This newly awakened interest in the affairs of 
Great Britain is not an attempt on the part of 
the American to patronize the English. It is the 
direct result of our colossal wealth, of our new 
territorial responsibilities, and of our enforced in- 
terest in the policies, affairs, failures, and suc- 
cesses of the great empire. We can no longer 
avoid this concern in the empire's affairs if we 
would. It is not an impertinent nor an idle curi- 
osity and criticism, it is a new burden. 

It is no longer a question of whether or no it 
is an impertinence for an American to deal with 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 3 

the British Empire; let me be frank, since I have 
been guilty, and explain that I, at least, consider 
it a necessity. It is our business, nowadays, to 
know as much of the internal and external con- 
ditions of the British Empire as possible, and to 
study these conditions from an American point 
of view for our own benefit, even if for no other 
reason. Next to our own affairs, the affairs of 
Great Britain are of most importance to us. 

Should Great Britain lose India, lose the Suez 
Canal, lose the supremacy of the sea, become an- 
other Venice, Spain, Holland, or Denmark, the 
one hundred million inhabitants of the United 
States would find themselves with new and far 
heavier burdens. We are no longer troubling 
ourselves as to whether an American book will 
be read, since it has become a patriotic duty for 
the American who is blessed with the opportu- 
nity, to study the social, moral, and economical 
conditions of the very people who, less than a 
century ago, good-naturedly laughed out the 
question: "Who reads an American book.^" 
Times have changed; we have changed. 

An intelligent public opinion about foreign 
affairs needs fostering in America, for the time 
is not far distant when America will need the 
backing of knowledge, experience, and of the 
travelled information of her wisest men, to meet 



4 THE \VEST IN THP: EAST 

the problems that are even now preparing for 
her. 

As an example, I might add, if I were not the 
friend and admirer of both Mr. President Taft 
and Mr. Knox, that uninformed diplomacy has 
"dished" us in the East. The suggestion com- 
ing from Washington, that the six great powers 
should control together the railway situation in 
northern and southern Manchuria, was received 
coldly in St. Petersburg and in Tokio, and with 
amused condescension in London, Paris, and 
Berlin. I was in the East at the time, and at 
more than one ambassadorial table it was not 
easy to explain our motives. It is tlie sane and 
the fair solution of a ticklish problem if we are 
to have an open door in China, but as diplomacy, 
as a means to an end, it was a lamentable failure. 
It drove Russia and Japan together, and on the 
fourth of July, 1910, an agreement was signed 
between them, which provides for "friendly co- 
operation with a view to the improvement of their 
respective railway lines in Manchuria and the 
perfecting of the connecting services of the said 
lines, and to abstain from all competition preju- 
dicial to the realization of this object." 

In undiplomatic language this means hands 
off in IManchuria, a sign to other powers to keep 
off the grass. 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 5 

The Japanese are building at great cost a rail- 
way bridge across the Yalu River, and a broad- 
gauge railway from thence to Mukden. The 
Russians control the Trans-Siberian Railway, 
with a branch line from Harbin to Mukden, 
which has thus far been operated at a loss. 

This great valley, stretching up from the Gulf 
of Pechili and the Gulf of Liao-tung for hundreds 
of miles, only needs improved agricultural ma- 
chinery and cheap labor, which is at hand, to 
develop into a grain-growing territory equal to 
the feeding of all Japan. 

If Mr. Knox had been with me on my tortuous 
and tiresome journey through this fair land, he 
would not have dreamed of suggesting that Japan 
and Russia should share these Chinese spoils 
with other countries, or admit a participating 
influence in a land watered by their blood, and 
into which they were pouring money. 

A suggestion to us from France and Russia on 
the fourth of July, 1776, that they should share 
in our hardly won opportunity, would have been 
considered by us as fantastical as was the pro- 
posal of Mr. Knox by Russia and Japan. 

We have by this agreement between Russia 
and Japan not only closed the door on ourselves, 
but we have put England in a difiicult position. 
We have done even more than that. We have 



6 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

made it still easier for Japan to gobble Korea, ^ 
though she is pledged not to do so, and to turn 
her attention to the consolidation of her recent 
conquests and to the Pacific. Japan need no 
longer be uneasy in the East, and both Russia 
and Japan may now turn their eyes to matters 
of more serious import to them. Russia becomes 
free again to study the situation in India and the 
Persian Gulf; and Japan may become less suave 
in contemplating the exclusion of her citizens 
from Australia, the Philippines, San Francisco, 
and Vancouver. 

As a diplomatic move this affair was as ill-con- 
sidered and as embarrassing in its consequences 
as can well be imagined. If Mr. Knox had been 
in the employ of the Japanese government he 
could not have aided them more successfully. 

Our government was probably not kept in 
touch with the situation in the East. Our de- 
plorable system of choosing men to act as our 
diplomatic and sensitive antennae abroad, be- 
cause they have been successful in the manip- 
ulation of ward, city, or state voters at home, 
will ere long, and fortunately, bankrupt itself. 
Whether the reward-seeking politician likes it or 

^ This was written before the recent annexation of Korea by the 
Japanese. When I was in Tokio and in Seoul, I was told solemnly, 
by officials of high standing, that there was no intention of annex- 
ins Korea. 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 7 

not, we must soon begin to appoint men who are 
travellers, linguists, and more or less socially ac- 
complished, if we are to hold our own, or even to 
know what is going on in Europe and in the East. 

Such commercial, industrial, and financial dis- 
turbances as are now our lot in America, are due 
to some extent to the fact that our productive 
powers along many lines are now greater than 
the demands of home consumption. Our agents 
abroad, whether ambassadors, ministers, or con- 
suls, have the new burden of blazing the way for 
an increase of our foreign trade. The best men 
that we can get for such posts will find compet- 
itors from Germany, Belgium, England, France, 
and Japan, well worthy of their steel. 

I have not only spent a year in the Far East, 
but I have also been for a short visit to South 
America. I cannot say too much to my fellow- 
countrymen of the successful labors of the new 
type of men who are gradually, but all too slowly, 
being tempted into our diplomatic and civil ser- 
vice. I have seen many of them now all over 
the world, men who are making this work their 
profession, men who speak and write the lan- 
guage of the country they are sent to, and men 
who can speak and write their own, men who 
represent the United States w^orthily. I have 
also seen the less worthy and seen at close 



8 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

quarters the harm they do. I regret that I must 
forbear to mention names, but if the people of 
the United States knew what I know of the mere 
dollar and cents gained for them, to mention 
nothing else, by the better-class men of our new 
civil service, and by the men representing us 
these days in the great capitals, they would wreck 
the reputation of any man, or any party, w^hich 
attempted to revert to the spoils system in the 
appointment of our civil servants abroad. It 
should be considered a misdemeanor to appoint 
men to these posts in payment of services ren- 
dered to persons or parties at home. I take it 
that the accomplished and scholarly Mr. Knox 
knows this already, and he could spare his fellow- 
countrymen unnecessary humiliation if he would 
always act upon it. 

At the beginning of the last century the West 
Indies were responsible for one-fourth of all 
British commerce. The sugar of the West Ind- 
ian Islands, and the colonies of Spain, were in 
those days what the valleys of Manchuria and 
the Eastern question are to-day. Great Britain 
was our rival at our own doors. To-day she has 
practically withdrawn her fleet from the Carib- 
bean Sea. 

It is acknowledged by everybody except per- 
haps Germany, that the Monroe doctrine is not 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 9 

a theory, but a fact, with a fleet behind it. We 
have undertaken to do justice, to keep the peace, 
and to safeguard property in South America, 
largely through the good will of the various 
states there. We do this, for their benefit and 
for our own, lest any nation should make it an 
excuse for the use of force in that region, that 
order is not preserved there, and that therefore 
their citizens and their property need protec- 
tion. This method of opening the door to a for- 
eign military power has been so successful along 
these same lines elsewhere, that we cannot afford 
to give the smallest excuse for such an argument. 
That is the pith of the Monroe doctrine, and 
what foreign nation has not adopted it, and 
fought for it in some part of the world .? The 
actual words of President Monroe were: "As a 
principle in w^hich the rights and interest of the 
United States are involved . . . the American 
continents . . . are henceforth not to be con- 
sidered as subject for future colonization by any 
European power. . . . We owe it, therefore, to 
candor and to the amicable relations existing be- 
tween the United States and those powers to de- 
clare that we should consider any attempt on 
their part to extend their system to any portion 
of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace 
and safety." 



10 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Americans must accept the responsibilities of 
the new situation whether they like them or not. 
They may not shirk the trust imposed upon 
them, whether for the present or for posterity. 
By our control in Cuba and Porto Rico, by the 
building of the canal, by the assertion that the 
whole of the South American continent is more 
or less within our sphere of influence, and by the 
taking over of the Philippines, we have made 
ourselves, to some extent, responsible for what 
goes on in the East. The Washington dictum 
of *'no entangling alliances" is a thing of the 
past. We cannot play the game single-handed. 
We must have a partner or partners, and we 
must look on at the game of Eastern politics 
and policies, not only with interest, but with a 
keen desire to know which partner to choose 
when the time of choosing comes. Above, all we 
should have diplomatic agents in the East com- 
petent to advise us in such matters. 

One of the best-informed students of Asian 
questions. Sir William Hunter, wrote, just be- 
fore his death: ''I hail the advent of the United 
States in the East as a new power for good, not 
alone for the island races that come under their 
care, but also in that great settlement of European 
spheres of influence in Asia, which, if we could 
see aright, forms the world problem of our day." 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 11 

The inherited prejudices and quarrels of for- 
eign-born, or of parent-foreign-born Americans, 
must be swept up in the dust-pan of provin- 
cial national housewifery and thrown away, that 
America as a whole may profit. No man is 
truly naturalized as an American who persists in 
grafting his particular Old World enmities or 
prejudices upon his new citizenship. Now that 
we are taking part in the world game, no faction 
in the body politic ought to be permitted to im- 
pede our progress, to hamper our strength, or to 
confuse our judgment. 

Let Irishmen send funds to back a political 
party in Great Britain; let Germans make pres- 
ents to the German emperor; let Italians send 
thousands in savings back to Italy ; let Poles hate 
both Czar and Kaiser; but let none of these en- 
mities have the slightest bearing upon our foreign 
relations or our foreign alliances. In them the 
Irish must cease to be Irish, the Germans to be 
Germans, the Italians to be Italians, and the 
Poles to be Poles, and all must recognize their 
fundamental citizenship, which is American. 
America, with imperial tasks on her hands, can 
recognize no tribes within her own borders, 
among her own citizens. 

It requires no long disquisition, and no argu- 
ments more convincing than the mere state- 



12 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ment of the facts, to show America's changed 
position as regards the European and the East- 
ern powers. Manila is forty-eight hours' jour- 
ney from Hongkong, Japan's island of Formosa 
is fifteen hours steaming from our island of 
Luzon, and we have large sums invested in 
Eastern trade, in Japanese bonds, and we are 
preparing to assist in the building and in the con- 
trol of a railway which will parallel a portion of 
Russia's Trans-Siberian and Japan's Southern 
Manchurian railways. Seventy-five miles from 
Tokio, and at the extreme western point of 
Japan, is a wireless telegraphy station at Choshi. 
The steamer Korea when five hundred miles off 
Hawaii communicated with Choshi, and now" in 
Japan they are planning to connect Choshi with 
Hawaii by wireless, by increasing the motor 
power at Choshi, which is now only fifty watts. 
This makes Japan indeed very much our neigh- 
bor. It may be added that Hawaii has, even 
now, three Japanese to one American, and Peru 
has a numerous colony of Japanese. Our great 
wealth, our energy, and our policy of an open 
door in China, force us to a participation in im- 
perial affairs, though there are those in America 
w^lio, through geographical ignorance, or on ac- 
count of parochial notions as to international 
amenities, imagine that these enterprises can be 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 13 

undertaken without ample provisions for a force 
on sea and land to back up these pretensions. 

The people of Oriental descent, and of 
Oriental customs of life, number between 
800,000,000 and 900,000,000, or more than 
half the total population of the world. India 
and China alone furnish, India 300,000,000, 
and China 400,000,000, of this total popula- 
tion. Their imports are estimated at some 
$2,000,000,000 a year. The chief importers 
are: 

India $450,000,000 

China 300,000,000 

Japan 250,000,000 

Hongkong 200,000,000 

Straits Settlements 200,000,000 

East Indian Islands 150,000,000 

x\bout one-third of this trade is between them- 
selves, while roughly $1,400,000,000 comes chiefly 
from Europe and the United States. Sad to re- 
late, the American share is only about six per 
cent, practically all the remaining ninety-four 
per cent being supplied by Europe. 

The chief imports of the Orient are cotton 
goods to the value of $400,000,000, manufact- 
ures of iron and steel, meat and dairy products, 
medicine, drugs, and dyes, tobacco, leather, ag- 
ricultural implements, vehicles for transporta- 



14 THE ^W.ST IN THE EAST 

tion, and articles of household and domestic 
use. The most important item is cotton goods, 
of which Europe supplies ninety-seven per cent, 
though it buys its raw material from the chief 
cotton-producer of the world, the United States. 

It is not our intention to neglect this commer- 
cial opportunity. We have reminded both Eu- 
rope and the East officially, on several occasions 
of late, that w^e must be considered as having a 
stake in the East, and that our claims and opin- 
ions must be respected. In certain quarters at 
home our assertion of claims and our assump- 
tion of responsibilities in the East are looked 
upon with dislike and with distrust. After many 
months of travel and study in Europe and in the 
East, an American looks upon this expansion of 
interest and responsibility, not only with com- 
placency, but with the feeling that it is unavoid- 
able. Even if we were not in control in the West 
Indies, and in the Philippine Islands, our posi- 
tion as guardians of the Panama Canal, and 
as sponsors for the safety from aggression of the 
South American republics, and our position on 
the Pacific Ocean, force us to play a part in the 
East. 

A nation, like an individual, must grow or die. 
It is true that our first concern is with matters 
at home. How a man will run, how he will 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 15 

think, even, depends not a little upon the con- 
dition of his heart. Our progress and prowess 
in the East depend, as is the case with England, 
upon our moral fibre at home. 

There are two respectable and useful influ- 
ences, of far-reaching importance in these days, 
both in England and America, falling under the 
general head of Social Reform, which are not 
without portents and promises of evil in this 
matter. One is a senseless and undiscriminat- 
ing charity, whether backed by individuals or 
officially by the state; and the other is a weak- 
ening of the willingness to accept responsibility, 
to take charge, to govern, to work out along 
big lines the national destiny, the latter being in 
some sort a consequence of the former. The 
Little Englanders, and those who oppose the 
building of the canal, and a ship subsidy and a 
powerful navy, are types of those who hang 
back in England and in America. It is a symp- 
tom of the weakening of the very finest char- 
acteristics of the race. 

The reader of the most elementary sketch of uni- 
versal history can tell of the cessation of growth, 
and then of the decay, of Bagdad, of Venice, of 
Bruges, of Spain, Portugal, and Holland. France 
is at the cross-roads now. Let the duties and re- 
sponsibilities, and the wealth and its problems. 



16 THE AVEST IN THE EAST 

come, problems by no means easy of solution, 
and the individual and the nation which stands 
up to them lives, or, shirking them for ease and 
safety, dies ! In spite of all that is preached by 
the uninformed provinciality of the day, even by 
respectable men such as Carnegie, a fierce fighter 
for his own hand in other days, nothing is more 
disastrous to civilization than purposeless Peace. 
War against environment is the essential con- 
dition of all life, whether animal, vegetable, indi- 
vidual, or national. The cow and the lap-dog 
are fruits of peace, useful and ornamental if you 
like, but not sufficient, not ideal. The cow is 
sacred in India, the lap-dog an idol in certain 
houses, but they are not a protection worth con- 
sidering. 

"La guerre," wrote von Moltke, "est une in- 
stitution de Dieu. En elle les plus nobles vertus 
trouvent leur epanouissement. Sans la guerre le 
monde se perdrait dans le materialisme." Joseph 
de Maistre writes: "Lorsque Tame humaine a 
perdu son ressort par la mollesse, I'incredulite, 
et les vices gangreneux qui sont I'exces de la 
civilisation, elle ne pent etre retrempee que dans 
le sang." I am not sure that both history and 
experience do not prove him to be right. I re- 
peat, I am not sure, but I am by no means an 
advocate of war for war's sake, and I am con- 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 17 

vinced that defencelessness in face of the armed 
forces all about us is practically an invitation to 
war. 

He travels with eyes and ears sealed, who does 
not become convinced that this century is not 
concerned, as were the sixteenth and seventeenth 
with religious struggles, as was the eighteenth 
with the rights of man, as was the nineteenth 
with questions of nationality. The twentieth 
century even now is characterized by a strug- 
gle for existence in the field of commerce and 
industry. Peripatetic philosophers in caps and 
blouses, or in white chokers, or deputations 
of journalists, merchants, and members of Par- 
liament, go and come, in the hope of deciding 
whether there is a German peril, or a Japanese 
peril. What could be more hopeless ? The rea- 
son they are at sea is the simple one, that the 
German peril and the Japanese peril are just as 
much a fact as the law of gravitation. 

The man who jumps out of a window falls to 
the ground. No man who lives in the three di- 
mensions of space, with which we are familiar, 
can escape that law. No man who lives in Eng- 
land and America can escape the vital necessity of 
Germany and Japan to expand or to go to the wall. 
The trouble has been and is, that we are 
looking at the question as one of malice, of di- 



18 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

plomacy, of choice. It is nothing of the kind. 
There is no blame, no right or wrong in the 
matter. It is life or death. For Great Britain 
and the United States, two nations already enor- 
mously rich, it is simply a question of more 
wealth. For Germany, for all Europe indeed, 
and for Japan, it is a matter of life and death. 

The phrase ''Yellow peril," "German peril," 
** Japanese peril," is unfortunate, for the word 
"peril" implies something terrible and immi- 
nent. The situation exists, but, as I hope to 
show later on in these pages, neither the "Yel- 
low peril" nor the "Japanese peril" is imminent 
nor of war-threatening danger to us in America, 
unless we provoke it by exaggerated sentimen- 
tality. I use the phrase because it is a familiar 
one, but I disassociate myself from any advocacy 
of nervous and self-conscious talk or action. 

To talk of friendly Japan, or of friendly Ger- 
many, however, is childish. No commercial rival 
armed to the teeth is friendly. 

Who knew in 1860 that Germany was soon to 
be the dominant power in Europe ? Who knew 
that she would defeat Austria in 1866.^ Who 
dreamed in 1868 that in two years she would 
crown her emperor at Versailles ? Who dreamed 
in 1888 that she was to be Great Britain's rival 
on the sea.^ Certainly no Englishman cried 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 19 

"Wolf" at the appropriate time. What Eng- 
lishman to-day explains why Germany smashed 
Denmark, humiliated Austria, ruined France, 
defies England on the sea, squeezes Holland 
commercially, and backs Austria in tearing up 
a treaty in order to make a grab in the Bal- 
kans ? What childish nonsense to call this cry- 
ing "Wolf"! It is an insult to that great power 
not to admit that it is a very fine, full-grown 
wolf, and just now very much on the prowl. 
That is the fundamental factor to be remem- 
bered in any discussion of this much-discussed 
question. It is not to be wondered at that the 
nations whose lives are at stake consider the 
matter more seriously than nations which have 
only pounds or dollars at stake. 

Germany has a territory smaller than the State 
of Texas, and a population of over 60,000,000, 
and Germany can no longer feed herself. She 
can feed herself for about two hundred and fifty 
days of the year. "What about the other one 
hundred and fifteen days ? That is the German 
peril, and that, on a smaller scale, is the Japanese 
peril, and to discuss the question as to whether 
it exists or not, is mere beating the air. It is 
not in the least an ethical problem, it is German 
policy, it is Japanese policy, and in both cases 
forced upon them, and war is sometimes an in- 



£0 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

strument of policy. You can no more wall in a 
nation, cramp it, confine it, threaten it with star- 
vation, without a protest and a struggle, than 
you can do the same to an individual. \^Tiether 
a man will fight for his life or not is not a ques- 
tion, it is a fact. Japan has already given the 
lie to our advocates of peace at any price in this 
country by annexing Korea and occupying 
Manchuria by force and in spite of our treaty 
with Korea, one article of which reads: "If 
other Powers deal unjustly with either govern- 
ment, the one will exert its good oflfices, on be- 
ing informed of the case, to bring about an 
amicable arrangement, thus showing its friendly 
feeling." 

The reader will understand the situation bet- 
ter with these comparisons at hand. The United 
States has a population of about 28 persons per 
square mile, Japan has a population of 317 to 
the square mile, while Europe, with an area in 
square miles not much larger than the United 
States, has a population of 390,000,000, or a 
density of 101 to the square mile. Great Britain 
has a smaller area than Colorado and a density 
of 470, while England alone has a density of 605. 
Belgium is less than one and a half times as large 
as Massachusetts, and has a density of 616. 
Canada has a density of only 1.75. Italy is not 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 21 

much larger than Nevada, but Nevada has less 
than one person to the square mile, and Italy 293. 
Rhode Island, our most densely populated State, 
has a population of 407 to the square mile ; next 
comes Massachusetts with 348. 

Neither Germany nor Japan has created or 
fostered this situation. The mischief and the 
malice begin when they are accused of what 
they cannot help. But to say the situation does 
not exist is ignorant, silly, or sentimental, de- 
pending upon the person who speaks. Nor am 
I putting words into the mouth of Germany 
or Japan when I say that both Germany and 
Japan must find outlets for their surplus popu- 
lation ; I am only quoting such authorities as the 
Prime Minister of Japan, and the distinguished 
German historian Professor Hans Delbriick. 

The interesting problem to put to oneself is, 
how is the hydra-headed democracy in England 
and America, easy-going and money-making, to 
face Germany, governed by its wise men, and 
Japan, now as much as a century ago, governed 
by a group of feudal nobles, with the mikado, 
who is not merely obeyed but worshipped by 
the great mass of the Japanese, at their back. 

I made bold, not long ago, to publish a serious 
study of the internal and domestic situation in 
England; and the following pages attempt to 



22 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

deal with the external and imperial relations of 
Great Britain, because as Americans we are 
vitally interested to know how soon, and to what 
extent, we are to be involved in imperial mat- 
ters in an even graver measure than now. 

Great Britain, with its 11,500,000 square miles 
of territory to protect, with its 400,000,000 of 
people to govern, must necessarily invite the 
scrutiny of Americans interested in the welfare 
of their own country. One need hardly pay 
heed to those foolish or sensitive persons who 
look upon such scrutiny as an impertinence. 

In 1907 the oflBcial figures show that the 
United Kingdom purchased $900,000,000 of 
food, drink, and tobacco in foreign countries; 
$850,000,000 of raw materials and partly manu- 
factured articles; $650,000,000 of manufactured 
articles. Great Britain, with its population of 
some 45,000,000 odd, is supporting foreign in- 
dustries, and enriching foreign nations, ourselves 
among the number, to the extent of $2,400,- 
000,000 annually. Her self-governing colonies 
bought foreign goods to the amount of $500,000,- 
000, and her crown colonies to the amount of 
$125,000,000. Here is a customer who buys 
over $3,000,000,000 worth of goods annually, 
and yet cannot find sufficient employment at 
home for her own people, who are emigrating 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 23 

to other countries. Here is a customer who per- 
sists in fooling himself with the belief that he is a 
free trader, when his net receipts from customs 
are $1,402,500,000 a year, and his net receipts 
from excise are $1,514,000,000, or a total taxation 
of food and drink amounting to $2,916,500,000. 
In addition to this he has the highest, the most 
costly, and the most pernicious tariff in the world 
in his trades-unions, which put a tax on every 
laborer's time and every laborer's hand and arm. 
Men are only allowed to work so many hours, and 
to produce so much. This is the tariff which is 
ruining England slowly but surely. America is 
really a free-trade country as compared with my 
delightfully dull friend John Bull, who goes to 
the extreme length of taxing time and taxing 
energy, thus adding enormously to the cost price 
of everything he sells, and thus building a tariff 
wall against his own workmen in their attempts 
to compete with the foreigner. It is the most 
cruel of all forms of taxation. 

British railways also add to this burdensome 
tariff by declining to quote, as do German and 
American railways, low rates for goods destined 
for export. There is much criticism of Ameri- 
can railway finance, but what should we think of 
such a situation as the following.^ A German 
manufacturer can send goods from Hamburg 



24 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

to Birmingham via London at a much less rate 
than a London manufacturer can send goods di- 
rect to Birmingham. Goods can be delivered 
in Birmingham from New York at a less price 
than from Liverpool. The British manufact- 
urer pays from twenty to thirty per cent higher 
freight rates on goods sent to West Africa, South 
Africa, Australia, and in many cases New Zea- 
land, than do German or American shippers. 
At any rate, this was the case as late as April, 
1909. It is worth noting in this connection that 
the railway rates in the United States are much 
lower than anywhere else in the world. The 
average railway rate per ton per mile in this 
country in 1909, was 7.63 mills; and the rates on 
the roads having great density of traffic, or 
handling mainly cheap and bulky commodities, 
are even lower. The average rate per ton per 
mile on all traffic of the Pennsylvania Railroad 
is 6.3 mills; of the Illinois Central, 5.8 mills; 
of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, 5.27 
mills; and of the Chesapeake and Ohio, 4.33 
mills ; while the average rate per ton per mile on 
the railways of France is 14 mills; and on those 
of Germany, 13 mills. 

The cost per mile of American railways av- 
erages $54,421; of the railways of the United 
Kingdom, $273,438; of the German Empire, 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 25 

$102,435; of France, $133,871; of Belgium, 
$162,236; and the present capitalization of Amer- 
ican railroads on a mileage basis is shown to be, 
by the most recent investigations of the Inter- 
state Commerce Commission, only slightly more 
to-day than it was twenty or thirty years ago.' 

As I write, in June, 1910, the Chancellor of 
the Exchequer is presenting his year's budget 
in the House of Commons, and I have just 
heard that House cheering the statement that 
Great Britain's next year's expenses will amount 
to nearly $1,000,000,000, or ^£198,000,000; that 
between 1899 and 1909 the expenditure on the 
navy increased from $120,000,000 to $200,000,- 
000; on the army from $100,000,000 to $140,- 
000,000; on the civil service from $185,000,000 
to the enormous sum of $330,000,000, or an in- 
crease of seventy-eight per cent. Great Britain's 
expenditures on army, navy, civil service, pau- 
pers, old-age pensioners, the insane, the feeble- 
minded, are a tribute to her wealth indeed. 

No other country could drive her workingmen 
to emigrate, could tax her productive power by 
trades-unions regulations, see her birth-rate di- 
minishing, and cheer her Chancellor of the Ex- 

1 " Waterways — Their Limitations and Possibilities." An address 
before the National Rivers and Harbors Congress of the United 
States, 1910, by Frederic A. Delano. "Cost, Capitalization and 
Estimated Value of American Railways," by Slason Thompson. 



^6 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

chequer as he cracks jokes on the subject of these 
figures. Nothing is put back into the sinking 
fund, nothing is taken off the income tax, ex- 
penditure has almost exactly doubled between 
1890 and 1910, and the national debt stands at 
$3,800,000,000, or $86 per head of the popula- 
tion. I may add that the gross national debt 
of the United States in the same year stood at 
$2,735,815,000, or $32 per head of the popula- 
tion; the national debt of Germany at $1,078,- 
375,000, or $16.50 per head of the population; 
the national debt of Japan at $1,162,074,850, or 
$25 per head of the population; the colossal 
national debt of France at $6,032,344,000, or 
$153 per head of the population. 

As an admirer of John Bull, I wish to call 
attention to the good health and good spirits, 
to the cheery, damn-the-consequences optimism, 
which this situation illustrates. 

Other countries are being taxed; we in the 
United States are being taxed, but we are bor- 
rowing on our motor-cars, our aeroplanes, our 
pianos, our jewelry, our luxuries, in short. To 
phrase it differently, and perhaps to some people 
more cogently, we are merely pawning our easily- 
done-without toys; but Great Britain, with her 
income tax at war figures, and her wine and 
spirits tax larger than ever, is pawning John 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 27 

Bull's coat and shoes! In the United States we 
have not even scratched the surface of our tax- 
able possibilities, while in Great Britain it looks 
as if Mrs. Bull's shawl will have to go next, and 
they have dreary weather for coatless men and 
shawUess women in Great Britain. 

To the American who has heard overmuch of 
the extravagance of America and of Americans 
of late years, it is a relief to hear Great Britain's 
present Chancellor of the Exchequer expounding 
jauntily an expenditure of a thousand million 
dollars. He and his followers evidently regard 
thrift as a dreary virtue. 

If an American returns from nearly a year's 
journey through the Far East, wherew Germany, 
Russia, Japan, China, India, Egypt, and Amer- 
ica are all keenly interested in this condition of 
the British Empire, and finds the Imperial Parlia- 
ment apparently oblivious of these matters, but 
engrossed in playing a game on the steps of the 
throne, with a handful of Irishmen who represent 
four million people only, he may be pardoned 
for thinking it is business to tell his countrymen 
what he can of the situation. If your neigh- 
bor's house is on fire, it would be silly indeed not 
to study the way the chimneys were built, dis- 
cover if possible how the fire started, and who 
was careless or who mischievous. He would be 



28 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

a sensitive householder indeed if he considered 
such an investigation impertinent. If the Brit- 
ish Empire is not on fire, no one will deny that 
there is much smoke and smouldering both at 
home and in India, in Egypt, in Persia, in South 
Africa, and elsewhere. 

Oh, we have heard this cry of " Wolf" so often ! 
reply a certain class of Englishmen. Yes, they 
heard it in Spain, in Holland, they heard it in 
France shortly before 1870, and heeded it not. 
That fable of the cry of ''Wolf" has done much 
harm, because it is misinterpreted. He who 
cries "Wolf" continually may be silly, but what 
of him who does not listen when the real wolf 
appears.^ fetter listen every time the cry is 
heard than lose all one's sheep. 

Colonels Stoppel and Lewal cried "Wolf" 
about the French army before 1870, and were 
met with the reply from the Minister of War Le 
Boeuf: "Nous sommes archipret — jusqu' au 
dernier bouton!" and shortly after, Germany 
crowned her emperor in Versailles. 

There are several hungry wolves about now, 
and one can almost see the ironical grin when 
they hear those martial heroes, Stead, and Car- 
negie, and William Jennings Bryan, telling the 
sheep: "Oh, it is only the old cry of Wolf!" 
One is tempted at times to agree with Herbert 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 29 

Spencer that "the ultimate result of shielding 
men from the effects of their folly is to fill the 
world with fools," but he lacks virility and pa- 
triotism who succumbs to that Capuan tempta- 
tion. Sir Frederick Maurice writes that of the 
one hundred and seventeen wars fought by Eu- 
ropean nations, or the United States, against civ- 
ilized powers from 1700 to 1870, there are only 
ten where hostilities were preceded by a declara- 
tion of war. 

Three hundred millions of Great Britain's pop- 
ulation are in India; let us go there and have a 
look at her biggest problem, and at the neighbors 
of India in China, Japan, Manchuria, Siberia, 
and Russia. 

*'The true fulcrum of Asiatic dominion seems 
to me increasingly to lie in the Empire of Hin- 
dustan. The secret of the mastery of the world 
is, if they only knew it, in the possession of the 
British people." So writes Lord Curzon. When 
one has travelled the length of the Mediterranean 
Sea, and then across it from Marseilles to Port 
Said, through the Suez Canal and across the 
Arabian Sea to Bombay from Aden, one needs 
no convincing and would listen to no arguments 
to the contrary that Great Britain, with India, 
is the greatest empire the world has seen, but that 
Great Britain without India, and the military 



30 THE \VEST IN THE EAST 

and trade route to India, would soon be a negli- 
gible quantity, a Spain, or Portugal, or Holland. 

To read through a geography is dull business, 
but to travel through your geography is enlight- 
ening indeed. 

The first thing that excites one's curiosity is, 
that there seems to be little free trade in this 
journey to Bombay. The Peninsular and Ori- 
ental Steamship Company practically monopo- 
lizes the passenger traflBc. I was informed that 
there was some arrangement with other com- 
panies which left the P. and O. Company a mo- 
nopoly. As a consequence of this, British gas- 
tronomies have full play. 

I have eaten stewed dog with the Sioux Ind- 
ians in our Northwest; I have eaten indescrib- 
able stuff in Mexico; I have lived for weeks 
in the middle of summer on a war-ship off the 
coasts of Cuba and Porto Rico on canned food; 
I have, I believe, eaten rats in Manchuria; I 
have, alas! overeaten in Paris; I have labored 
with the stodgy, heavy food of English country 
inns, and no harm has resulted; but when I 
landed from that P. and O. steamer at Bombay 
my stomach was in tears. My fellow country- 
men will find it hard to believe, but it is a fact, 
that on that same steamer on her way to some 
of the hottest weather in the world, in the Suez 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 31 

Canal and the Red Sea, there was only one kind 
of mineral water to be had, and that only in 
pints! Can pig-headed stupidity go further? 
The linen on my breakfast tray in the morning 
was, for the first two mornings, so besmeared 
and spotted with egg and coffee stains that I 
threatened to go to the captain. Remember, 
too, that the fares on these steamers are high, 
and that we were travelling as comfortably as 
the accommodations of the ship permitted. No 
wonder they are losing then* trade. But what 
business is it of mine.^ Why not go by some 
other line ? I will be frank, also, in my admira- 
tion, and say that when I travel with my women 
folk on the water, I am happier to think that 
Americans or Englishmen are in command. 
Both they and I will have a fair chance, and the 
American or the English captain will not be 
found among the saved if their passengers are 
not saved too. I am bound in honor to add 
that the agent of this same P. and O. line in Cal- 
cutta rendered me every service in his power, 
for which I shall never cease to be grateful, when 
I sought his good offices to help me in getting an 
invalid home. What do food and drink matter, 
after all, if one may count upon efficiency and 
kindness in the hour of distress and danger ? But 
even then, if it is not my business, and perhaps 



32 THE WIEST IN THE EAST 

it is not, to criticise, this is no answer to the 
hordes of houseless, hungry men that one sees 
any night on the Embankment in liOndon, nor 
to the rapidly increasing hundreds of thousands 
supported by the state there, nor to the hundreds 
of thousands who are emigrating because there 
is no work for them. They have a right to ques- 
tion the muddling, unenterprising methods of 
those in control, whose sole gauge of food, drink, 
and dirt is a thirteen per cent dividend. 

Even as we leave the quay at Marseilles the 
three races — the English, the Indian, and the 
French — are exploiting themselves. The Ind- 
ians, three of them doing one man's work, and 
physically awkward, are loading and unloading 
under the governing finger of a silent English 
officer. Half a dozen French girls between the 
ages of seven and twelve are dancing the can-can, 
as though they were in the Jardin de Paris, and 
soliciting the pennies of the passengers. 

A distinguished French physician has ex- 
plained the attitude of France toward con- 
scription and race suicide by saying that France 
is hundreds of years in advance of the rest of the 
world in civilization, and that the unruliness and 
selfishness and, as I should term it, their ma- 
tured frivolity, are marks of a higher civilization. 
Some of us call it decadence. In India we are 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 33 

to see a civilization, old when the French were 
in skins. There too ambition is dead, and three 
hundred millions are powerless in the hands of 
a few Englishmen. Perhaps civilization always 
ends by giving up the problem of life as insolu- 
ble, and settles down to the studied frivolity of 
Paris, or to the calm despair of India. 

Our fellow passengers are almost all English, 
with here and there a returning Parsi merchant, 
or a French, German, or American globe-trotter. 
There are also a number of women, some young, 
some of an uncertain, twilight age, who are go- 
ing out to be married. It was one of the features 
of travel all through the East, I found. On al- 
most every ship, under the wing of the captain, 
one met one or more of these w omen going out 
to marry men whose duties did not permit them 
to go in search of their brides. So far as I could 
see, the protection of the captain was altogether 
unnecessary. If one may judge of the loneliness 
of the bachelors in the East by the brides who 
go out to marry them, it must be distressing. 
There are more than a million more women than 
men in England alone; the women outnumber 
the men in Scotland also; only in Ireland is 
there anything like an equality of numbers. 
Such wealth of choice would lead, one would 
suppose, to a certain aesthetic discrimination, but 



34 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

apparently in these matters the East has the ef- 
fect of hurrying the white man, though in turn 
the East is not hurried by him. 

"Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle 

the Aryan brown, 
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he 

weareth the Christian down; 
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the 

name of the late deceased, 
And the epitaph drear: *A fool lies here who tried to 

hustle the East/" 

So writes Mr. Rudyard Kiphng, who easily sur- 
passes any man of our breed, in his power of im- 
aginative analysis. 

Tell me no more of the American twang! It 
is distressing, if you please, but having travelled 
many days in the atmosphere of the English 
voice, I mudi prefer the rank infidelity of the 
American whining twang to the guttural, not to 
say catarrhal, sing-song of Anglican vocal con- 
formity. Some of the more piercing English 
voices may be likened unto diminutive steam- 
whistles suffering from bronchitis. 

He is a fussy traveller indeed who pays much 
attention to such matters as these when he is 
sailing through the Mediterranean to the land 
of the Great Mughal for the first time. These 
are mere comments to put away in the card- 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 35 

catalogue of one's brain for possible future 
reference. 

What an embroidered sea it is! Fringed by 
Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Persia, Palestine, 
Egypt, Arabia. We see the land of the Phar- 
aohs, of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Alexander, 
Caesar, Hannibal, Napoleon. We sail through 
the religions, the law, the literature, the art, the 
traditions that ruled, and rule, the world. 
Here are the Pentateuch, the Psalms, Job, the 
Gospels, the Greek drama and comedy, the 
Koran, the Epic of Antar, the literature and law 
of the Latins and the Italians, and the greatest 
of comedies, Don Quixote. If the Avon emp- 
tied into this sea, it could claim all the greatest 
names in literature. And what a literary gamut 
it is from Don Quixote to the thirteenth chapter 
of I Corinthians! 

We sail past Rome, Athens, Carthage, Alex- 
andria, Jerusalem, Mecca, and through that nar- 
row blue ribbon of the Suez Canal, which binds 
together the greatest empire of them all, the Brit- 
ish Empire. It is the sea of all the most poig- 
nant associations of the world. No one's mem- 
ories are complete without it. Not to know the 
Mediterranean and its associations is not to be 
educated, is not to be a man of the real world, 
is not to know the history of the world, for the 



36 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

tides of this sea are the pulse-beats of the heart 
of history. We Americans are merely ethnologi- 
cal mushrooms in a grove of palms and cedars. 

At Port Said we are in the anteroom of the 
East. I do not intend to write a guide-book. 
Messrs. Murray and Baedeker have too many 
literary parasites already, but I must let the ink 
bubble occasionally with my personal delight, 
and perhaps to old travellers my naif enjoyment 
of every day of those many months spent in the 
East. I gazed at those Arabs at Port Said, I 
studied their sensual, and in many cases dia- 
bolical, faces with awe and interest. In Europe 
other white men are different, to be sure, but it 
is possible to account for the differences, to ana- 
lyze the differences in a superficially satisfactory 
way. But these human beings are not merely 
different, they are something else. 

That tall, naked, black man, with his head 
shaven, sitting in this broiling sun, which would 
knock me over in half an hour were my head not 
covered with cork and linen, and protected be- 
sides by a white umbrella; this man, with his 
prognathic jaw, his shining teeth, his legs and 
shoulders looking as though they had been re- 
cently polished, his eyes with that clearness and 
sheen in them, as though they were swimming in 
some liquid, like a compass, he may be common- 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 37 

place to these other travellers, but I lean over the 
side and gloat over him. 

This is the blood that slashed through Europe 
and the East, crying that theirs was the one true 
God, and that Muhammad was his one true 
prophet; this is the fellow I looked at in my 
illustrated geography many, many years ago in- 
stead of committing the text that framed him to 
memory. I can see those vignettes now. I can 
see the Malay with his pagoda hat, the Indian 
prince with his bejewelled turban, the Japanese 
with his straw coat, the Burmese lady with her 
huge cigar, the Chinese with his shaven forehead, 
and his pigtail. Those baby lessons in eth- 
nology, how I should have devoured the text had 
I dreamed that one day I was actually to eat, 
and talk, and shoot, and ride, and visit with these 
people, and even take photographs of them with a 
machine that was not even invented in those days. 

I make no apology for gazing at that boat-load 
of Arabs, huddled together waiting to coal, or 
floating away having done their day's work. It 
is my first real sip of the East, and I am far more 
excited even than when I played my first game of 
base-ball in a real uniform, made in the sewing- 
room ; or when I marched up to take a painfully 
attenuated degree at Harvard; or when I made 
my first speech in public. These are all exciting 



38 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

episodes, but now I am voyaging into the world 
from whence we all came. I am actually getting 
near the country where they invented Adam, and 
Eve, and Noah. In a few hours I shall see the 
place where Moses made a reputation as an am- 
phibious commissariat which in my boyhood im- 
pressed me far more than his unequalled ability 
as a law-giver. Moses, and Jesus, and Muham- 
mad were all born in this region, in this climate, 
in this atmosphere, yes, I am bound to confess 
that it was exciting. 

The best books on the East, as every one 
knows, are the Bible and the Arabian Nights, 
and yet I found most travellers were saturating 
themselves with snippity descriptions of monu- 
ments and places, with tabloids of history, with 
technical paragraphs on architecture and the 
ethnic religions, with figures about the height of 
this and the length of that, or condensed statis- 
tics of exports and imports, and the tonnage 
through the Suez Canal, and dates about the 
Pharaohs, and the Mughals. No wonder they 
see nothing, know nothing, enjoy nothing, and 
come home bringing a few expletives, adjectives, 
and photographs, which can be had for a small 
price either in New York or in London. 

The first thing to do in going to the East is 
to turn your education out on your desk so that 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 39 

you can get at the bottom of it, and there you 
will find the Bible, and the Arabian Nights, and 
the Odyssey, and the Iliad, and Virgil, and Herod- 
otus, and Xenophon, and you will realize what 
a fool you w^ere not to have devoted more time to 
them when you were asked to do so. Guide- 
books can get you to the East, but they do not 
get you inside. It is temperament, that counts, 
not trains. 

It must be about as amusing to visit the East 
with a dimly informed courier, as to be taken 
through the Louvre by a page-boy from the hotel ; 
or to visit the British Museum, with the driver of 
the cab whom you happen to hail to take you 
there. Having been in the East, I can only say 
to other travellers that I would not waste even 
a week's time in all the East, with only the re- 
sources of the average tourist at my command. 
It was the unstinted, and instructed, and expe- 
rienced hospitality of the English in India and 
China, and of the Japanese in Japan, Korea, and 
Manchuria, that made my visit profitable and 
immensely enjoyable. Through them, and the 
native princes of India, I was given a universal 
passport, and welcomed as a chartered and priv- 
ileged guest, and the burden of my debt to them 
for that glorious year is beyond lightening by 
any poor words of mine. 



40 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Even these first Orientals out here on the 
fringe seem to say to me: Beware of the men 
who are ever itching to be doing something, who 
cannot wait. They must be cowards at bottom, 
afraid of themselves or of the world ! And after 
these many months I realize that this is, to the 
Westerner, the disturbing message of the whole 
East, and I wonder if they are right. Perhaps 
there are two forms of fatalism, the fatalism of 
despair, and the fatalism of confidence, and there 
you have the East and the West, never to be rec- 
onciled. 

The first thing one notices on going ashore for 
a few hours at Port Said, is an illustration of the 
methods of that British race, w^hose most notable 
and admirable characteristic is their ability in 
the governing of alien peoples. An English po- 
liceman, in the uniform of the Khedive, protects 
me from the yelping boatmen, with the same im- 
perturbable good humor with which I am so 
familiar in Piccadilly or the Strand. His coun- 
tenance changes slightly under different circum- 
stances. When he marches alongside the ten 
thousand suffragettes on their way to the Albert 
Hall he wears the amused expression, as of 
one who feels that he impersonates there and 
then an unanswerable reply to all their shrillness, 
both physical and vocal. When he convoys 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 41 

thousands from the East End to Hyde Park he 
is more serious, but there again he looks, in his 
steady, patient manhood, an answer, even to 
them. On the boat-landing at Port Said he 
seems more bored, as of a man tired of brushing 
aside flies, but his behavior is ever the same. 

The journey through the Suez Canal, a dis- 
tance of about one hundred miles, is a slow 
one, as we may not wash away these banks, 
which cost eighty million dollars to build, with 
the swash of a too-rapid progress. Watchmen, 
crouching about their small fires at night, dot 
the shores on both sides. For the first time I see 
camels actually at work, own brothers to those 
Barnum & Bailey loafers of my boyhood. In 
the glare of the searchlight, the sandy desert on 
both sides of the canal is so bright that every 
now and again one catches a glimpse of a fox, 
jackal, or hyena, and all through the night one 
hears their cries. The sunsets, the light, and 
the stillness are all different, all new to me. 
The sunsets are sunsets of shade, rather than 
colors, and De Tocqueville is right when he says : 
"Ce sont les nuances qui se querellent, non les 
couleurs." There is a kaleidoscope brilliancy' 
about these cloudless sunsets, a stabbing at your 
eyes with vivid shafts and shades, with plenty 
of orange and purple and brown in them, that 



42 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

make me wish I were an artist, and which con- 
vert me at once to the truthfulness which I had 
disbeheved of many Eastern sketches. The 
Hght seems to be something you are looking 
through ; and the stillness makes you lonely even 
with some one sitting beside you. The darkness 
comes down all through the East with incredi- 
ble quickness. You can read your book, and 
then of a sudden you need a lantern to see your 
way. The sun does not come up, or go down, 
it shoots up and down. These people live 
mentally in a perpetual twilight, but physically 
they are always in a blaze of light or in pitch- 
darkness. Perhaps they enjoy keeping their 
minds in a state of dawn, or twilight, as a 
protest. 

After the Suez Canal comes the Red Sea, 
and on the Arabian coast, about eight hundred 
miles south, is Jiddah. I have no interest in 
Jiddah, but Jiddah is the seaport of Mecca, and 
somehow the word Mecca reverberates in my 
brain. I have been wont to mention Seringa - 
patam, Kamchatka, Timbuctoo, and Mecca and 
Seoul, as far-away, fairy sort of places, that I 
was no more likely to be near, much less to visit, 
than, say, Mars. That comes of living in the 
West. But here I am, and I cannot get quite 
awake to the fact. 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 43 

Jiddah, too, actually has the tomb of Eve. 
That impresses my imagination very much. Not 
that this first languor of the East devitalizes my 
rather unorthodox upbringing, tempting me to 
the historical acceptance of Eve. My theology 
is unshattered, but I am bound to say I have a 
friendly feeling for the imaginative proficiency of 
the man who, perhaps, left his money to build 
a tomb for Eve! It is at least a good schooling 
in cosmopolitan charity, to be near people who 
repair to the tomb of Eve as to a sanctuary; 
people so calm and so unflurried by the welter of 
the world, that they ignore the inextricable moral 
confusion into which that lady is accused, by 
many, of having plunged us. 

Later on I am to be the guest of a charming 
Eastern lady. Her Highness the Begum of Bho- 
pal, and she is to present me with a volume of 
her travels. She is a Muhammadan, and has 
made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In this volume 
she writes of Jiddah, and mentions the tomb of 
Eve and writes: "Eve was the wife of Adam." 
It is paralyzing to Western orthodoxy and to 
W^estern conceit to realize that this lady feels 
called upon to tell her readers, that Eve was the 
wife of Adam. It clears the mind of a lot of 
underbrush when one realizes that in the East, 
among the eight or nine hundred millions of 



44 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

people we are to visit, one must introduce Eve 
as the wife of Adam, and even then be asked, in 
all probability, Who was Adam? How differ- 
ent must the standards be in a country, and 
among peoples, where Eve is distant, dim, un- 
known! It is true that even among ourselves 
Eve wears but a scanty garment even of tradi- 
tion, but now I am to travel in lands where she 
has not even a figment of the imagination to 
clothe her. 

I begin to understand that all of us Occidentals 
are provincial, that we have overestimated our 
importance, our influence, and the effect of our 
impact upon the Orientals. I shall try to re- 
member, as I study these people, that Eve is 
introduced, in this other world as the wife of 
Adam. It is already becoming evident that 
many things that I have considered as of funda- 
mental importance have no significance here at 
all. All the clocks, and yardsticks, and weights 
and measures are different, or do not exist at all. 
We are going into a world where the best of us, 
no matter what our education and experience, 
can only grope about. We may have conquered 
the Eastern world, but, apparently, we have 
changed it very little. Our much-vaunted civ- 
ilization does not impress them, as we think it 
should. They look upon our civilization, ap- 



ON THE WAY TO THE EAST 45 

parently, as an attempt to make men comfort- 
able, in a life which men ought not to love. 

"The brooding East with awe beheld 

Her impious younger world. 
The Roman tempest swell'd and swell'd 
And on her head was hurl'd. 

**The East bow'd low before the blast 
In patient, deep disdain; 
She let the legions thunder past. 
And plunged in thought again.*' 



II 

THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 

IT is because they are very sophisticated, or 
because they know the wonders beyond, 
that certain travellers tell you that Bombay 
is only the entrance to India, and not interesting. 
One can make some very accurate guesses about 
the people inside the house from the condition 
of the front steps, the cleanliness of the bell- 
handle or knocker, and the manners and appear- 
ance of the servant who opens the door. At 
least I am almost unconsciously in the habit of 
doing so, and one is apt to be more cheerful at 
the drawing-room entrance if the guardian of 
the outer door gives you a pleasant greeting. 
The British front door to India, or Govern- 
ment House Bombay, gave us such a pleasant 
greeting that we were cheerful throughout the 
rest of our stay, despite hardships and illness 
here and there. 

First we went to the new hotel, considered the 
best in India, but we were there for a very short 
time, for after delivering various letters of intro- 

46 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 47 

duction we were promptly invited to become the 
guests of His Excellency the Governor of Bom- 
bay. But already at the hotel I saw many things. 
Along the halls outside the guest-rooms I saw 
little knots of native servants, in groups of from 
two to half a dozen, according to the size of the 
master's family. How little an Indian needs, 
even with the good pay of a servant, was plainly 
evident. They had their beds and cooking uten- 
sils with them, and at certain hours one saw 
them eating, or sleeping, huddled together out- 
side their master's door. 

Our rooms were large and airy. There was 
only the necessary furniture, no hangings, and 
our own bedding was used on the beds. Every- 
body carries his ow^n bedding in India, and out- 
side the large establishments of the government 
officials, everywhere it is needed. You are sup- 
posed to carry your own bedding with you just as 
you carry your own tooth-brush. In the trains, 
and there are very long train journeys, by slow 
trains, in India, in the guest-houses of the native 
princes, in camp of course always, and in the 
hotels and inns, your own bedding is a neces- 
sity. Indeed you can scarcely carry too much in 
India if you wish to be comfortable. All sorts 
of clothing, from fur coats to the thinnest linen, 
all sorts of hats from a cap to a pith-helmet, a 



48 THE \VEST IN THE EAST 

spirit-lamp, a folding table and chair, a small 
amount of tinned or bottled food and a supply of 
mineral water for the train, a large supply of 
linen and underclothing, for one changes often, 
and the laundry work is done by beating on flat 
stones. The changes of temperature from noon 
till midnight are startling. One must give up 
cold baths and take to tepid or hot water, and be 
careful, indeed, what, and how much, one eats and 
drinks. No alcohol before sunset, and very little 
then, and the plainest and most nourishing food. 

In this land, as large almost as the whole of 
Europe, there are only a few large cities where 
one can buy any of the luxuries or comforts of 
life outside the obvious, and what you need you 
must carry with you. On a large scale you do 
what the native does, you carry your household 
gods and goods about with you. 

How differently *'pick up your bed and walk" 
sounds in your ears when you see a whole popu- 
lation of hundreds of millions actually carrying 
their beds with them whenever they move. Why 
should one take heed as to what one shall eat, or 
drink, or wear, when a handful of rice, a thimble- 
ful of water, and a loin-cloth suffice. The group 
of servants in front of their master's door at the 
hotel, or the hundreds of families I have seen 
travelling by train, by bullock-cart, or even on 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 49 

foot, have squeezed and sifted life's necessities 
down to the vanishing-point. 

I can see why the gentle Prince of Peace ap- 
pealed to the Roman, the German, the Scandi- 
navian, the Briton. Those heavy-eating, hard- 
drinking, hard-fighting peoples, who must have 
skins, and furs, and huts, and fires, or die, saw 
in Him and His teachings the very antipodes of 
all they were, or strove to be. Not so the gentle 
Hindu. These are not miracles to him; indeed 
along material lines, he and his ancestors, so 
far as any man can recall history, have lived 
in that way. 

India has sixty-two million Muhammadans 
to-day, and but very few Christians, and most of 
these Muhammadans are converts. The Mu- 
hammadan conquerors brought few women with 
them, and their direct descendants are few in 
number to-day compared with their converts. 
To slay the idolater and the heretic, and to be 
recompensed in another world of fascinating 
material, not to say sensual gratifications, for 
so doing, and in this world to be received at 
once on conversion into the great Muhammadan 
brotherhood, where there is no caste and no irre- 
movable inequalities, this has appealed to the 
Indian far more than the doctrines or promises 
of Christianity. 



50 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Muhammadanism is purely democratic. There 
is no caste even of priests. He who mounts the 
pulpit and prays, preaches, or reads from the 
Koran is only an equal among equals, and not set 
apart or considered above others. It is much like 
the democratic ways of early Puritan Congre- 
gationalism, when the sages would have snorted 
indeed at the thought that their religious leader, 
was in the least tainted with any such doctrine 
as the indelibility of the priesthood, or powers 
of confession or absolution, other than those of 
any father at his own fireside. Congregational 
ministers of the old type were leaders in politics, 
were sent to Congress, and abroad as ambassa- 
dors, and took a conspicuous part in town meet- 
ings, and would have scoffed at any insinuation 
that they w^ere priests, or not as other men, in the 
homely duties and responsibilities of daily life. 
Alas, as society becomes more complicated, it 
demands easy and simple classifications and no- 
menclature, and thus a priest is a priest, a 
banker a banker, a professor a professor, with- 
out much time or thought given to shades and 
differences. 

This feature of the Muhammadan creed 
appeals strongly to the caste-bound and neg- 
lected Hindu, who must be born again, and 
born again in no metaphorical sense, to move 



THE Gx\TEWAY TO INDIA 51 

an inch above the social status allotted to him 
by his own religion. Besides this, the Christian 
brotherliness and love in India are names, not 
facts. The low-caste Hindu may become what 
his abilities lead to amongst the Muhammadans, 
he may become a great man among them, and 
marry into the proudest family. Their wel- 
come is a real one. But what Christian mission- 
ary even, let alone the layman, offers his daugh- 
ters or sisters to the Hindu convert.^ There is 
not even a Christian club in India of which he 
can become a member. The proudest native 
prince in India is not allowed inside the doors 
of the Bombay Yacht Club, even as a guest. 

One often hears Protestantism and Catholi- 
cism compared, to the disadvantage of the latter, 
because the Protestant countries are more pros- 
perous, wealthier, more powerful. This same 
reasoning is used when comparing Christianity 
with Brahmanism, Confucianism, Buddhism, 
but the argument does not lie, as the lawyers say. 
To the Hindu mind it is no argument at all. 
His ideal is to get out of the world, not to get 
what he can out of it, and stay in it. That one's 
beliefs should be scientifically true, or that they 
should produce in an individual or in a nation 
powers of wealth-getting or comfort-making, is 
not only not required of his faith by the Orien- 



52 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

tal, but he looks upon such tests as preposterous. 
If plague or famine come to a whole province, 
or loss or illness come to him individually, or the 
will of a ruler, whom he believes to be divinely 
guided, brings disgrace upon him, all these are 
accepted as inevitable. It is part of the mys- 
terious and incomprehensible divine plan, and 
leads to no questioning, criticism, or even com- 
plaint of the ways of God with man. We recog- 
nize self-sacrifice and unselfishness as spiritual 
graces to be cultivated, but the great majority 
of Christians look upon an unsuccessful Chris- 
tian as lacking in some essential manner the full 
dower of his faith. If the Hindu believed that 
his faith forbade working on Sunday, or forbade 
divorce for example, he would sacrifice himself 
rather than disobey. We on the contrary have 
allowed laws of economics, and laws of health 
and freedom to over-ride the dicta of the priest. 

I am not deciding between the two, though I 
believe we are right; I am merely noting differ- 
ences, which must be kept in mind by the stu- 
dent of the East, if he wishes to gain something 
more of an understanding of the situation, than 
the mere superficial contempt, and cobw^ebby ex- 
periences, of a self-satisfied traveller. 

The conversion of the thousand million brown 
and yellow men of Asia, by the five hundred mill- 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 53 

ion Christians, is so far away in the distance that 
no eye, even of the imagination, can see so far 
down the aisles of time. 

Far be it from me, a Christian, to discourage 
the attempt. On the contrary, Christianity has 
become so clogged with materialistic misinter- 
pretations of its messages; the tent-making and 
fishing apostles have been so lost in cardinals 
and bishops living in palaces with the revenues 
of princes, that the Christian missionary seems 
almost the one fine and genuine thing left. Just 
because there is no hope of visible success for 
him, he is the more admirable and the more 
Christian. 

It is true that the East moves slowly, but even 
if we count by centuries, the Muhammadan has 
much the best of it. One Oriental race, the 
Jews, who live among us, who have been perse- 
cuted in every country of the world save America, 
have not been converted to Christianity. The 
Parsis in Bombay, there are some fifty thousand 
of them out of a total population of some eight 
hundred thousand, are the most prominent and 
the most powerful people, financially and polit- 
ically there, and come most in contact with the 
British politically and commercially; but they 
are as much Zoroastrians to-day as when they 
fled to India from Persia. The Parsis all over 



54 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

India still retain the head-gear which was forced 
upon them as a humiliation in the early days 
of their coming to India, just as the Chinese 
retain the pig-tail, which was forced upon them 
as a mark of bondage, by their conquerors the 
Tartars, two hundred and fifty years ago. The 
Parsis, rich and poor alike, though like the Jews 
there are few poor amongst them, maintain their 
religious tenets amongst this mass of Hindus 
and Muhammadans, and despite the influence 
of their friends the Christian British. 

The towers of silence are one of the sights of 
Bombay. The Parsis will not defile the three 
elements, water, fire, and earth, with the re- 
mains of their dead. They refuse to dispose of 
bodies after death in the water, in the ground, 
or by burning. 

It happened that we arrived at the towers of 
silence on Malabar Hill just as a funeral pro- 
cession was marching in. Shortly after we were 
escorted to the top by a courteous attendant, 
whose brother was the chief official. Once there 
he explained in detail the procedure. In the 
midst of our talk another procession wended its 
way up the hill, and we saw at close quarters 
what was at the moment being described. 

The corpse is borne up the hill, followed by 
relatives and friends in white, walking two by 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 55 

two, and hand in hand, the joining of hands sym- 
bohzing the perpetual prayer between the "two 
thus Unked together. The procession halts, and 
the body is then carried to a raised platform 
where the covering is taken off. A swarm of 
vultures from the surrounding trees flop heavily 
down, and soon nothing is left but the bones. 
The bones of all alike are then thrown into a 
common pit, where they are converted to ashes 
by chemicals. 

The mourners sit about in the quiet grove pro- 
vided with seats and flowers and fountains, say- 
ing their prayers, while the filthy birds have their 
orgies. Tales are told of a finger, or some other 
portion of a body, being dropped upon the pas- 
sers-by in the street below by the gorged and 
greedy birds. It is a grewsome spectacle to 
those unaccustomed to it, but the Parsis I saw 
there seemed serene and peaceful mourners, quite 
undisturbed by the quarrelling birds flapping 
their wings lazily in over-fed contentment. 

Here was a notable example indeed of differ- 
ence of custom and its results. My friend the 
Parsi could hardly refrain from the expression 
of disgust at our method of delivering our dead 
to the earth and the worms. 

Because we of the West have succeeded be- 
yond measure in material things, as compared 



56 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

with the East, we are apt to assume that our 
meftiods in spiritual things are for that reason 
superior. As I have said elsewhere, this is 
faulty reasoning. I doubt if we have any right 
to assert ourselves along these lines. These 
Parsis are as confident in their faith, their creed, 
their methods, horrible though this particular rite 
seems to us, as are we. It is this hands-off policy 
in such matters on the part of the British which 
deserves the highest encomiums for their rule. 

It is a pity that in matters of education they 
have not adopted the same policy, a pity too 
that they are playing into the hands of a minute 
minority both in India and in Egypt by pushing 
to the front the theory of representative govern- 
ment, which the vast majority, at any rate in 
India, do not understand, cannot reconcile with 
their traditions, and do not want. I should be 
sorry to appear bumptious in making this cate- 
gorical statement. It is true that I have not 
talked with all these three hundred millions of 
people, nor has any one else, but I venture to 
say, modestly, that I have talked with a greater 
variety than most travellers, and with a far 
greater variety than most officials, whose work 
precludes the possibility of much travel, and the 
consensus of those I met bears me out in this 
statement. 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 57 

It is not, and this is the crux of the confusion 
in most Western minds, that they are not ready 
for representative government, and for Chris- 
tianity, but that they have no wish to get ready. 
They do not want them at all. We Westerners 
are exaggeratedly impressed with the superi- 
ority of our institutions, both secular and eccle- 
siastical. We believe that if only other peoples 
understood them they would adopt them. We 
spend millions, and many lives, in making them 
understand, and my personal opinion is that the 
more they understand, the further they are from 
adopting our institutions. Our points of view, 
our traditions, our moral and mental freezing 
and boiling points, are worlds apart. The Ind- 
ians who have seen most of England and the 
English appreciate them least, and have no over- 
powering wish to copy English institutions, or to 
become English. The Parsis of Bombay, with 
no caste prejudices, who are on the friendliest 
footing with the English, who are an intelligent 
and intellectually superior people, are as much 
Zoroastrians to-day as though the New Testa- 
ment were non-existent. The ideals of Chris- 
tianity do not appeal to the great mass of the 
Eastern races, or not to be too didactic, have not 
appealed to them thus far successfully. 

With the complaint and criticism of the trav- 



58 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

eller from the West that everything moves too 
slowly in the East, from missionary enterprise to 
the means of locomotion, I have no sympathy. 
I have ridden ponies, elephants, and camels, and 
driven in ox-carts and camel-carriages, and trav- 
elled nearly fifty-five thousand miles during the 
last year, in trains and ships, and I find them all 
too rapid. Even the eight miles an hour on 
General Kuroki's old military railway through 
Manchuria was too fast. There is so much to 
see on every hand that even an ox-cart may go 
too fast. When I think that this w^hole volume 
contains about two words for every mile I have 
travelled, I realize that I am right in saying that 
one goes too fast, rather than too slow, in the 
East. 

The Strand, Broadway, and even the boule- 
vards of Paris, with the grotesque eccentricities 
of the male attire, and the present-day unbifur- 
cated trouser gowns of the women, are tame, and 
brown, and dull, compared with the kaleido- 
scope of moving color in the streets of Bombay. 

At the races one day I turned my back on the 
horses and counted fifty-eight different kinds of 
head-gear amongst the men in the grandstand, 
and no doubt there were others I did not see. 
The Parsi, with his lacquered cow's hoof, the 
Arab, the Persian, the Hindu, the Muhamma- 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 59 

dan, from north, south, east, and west, were 
there, and how many more I know not, and 
when it is remembered that the Maharaja of 
Gwalior's head-gear is as different from that of 
his neighbor at Indore as is the cowboy's som- 
brero from the tile of a Beau Brummel, and 
that these differences exist all over the East, it 
is easy to realize that the streets of Bombay, to a 
new-comer, seem to be a waving, moving mass 
of form and color. 

The British in India in spite of the universal 
dislike of ostentation amongst the best of them, 
either here or at home, have been obliged to 
assume, officially at least, an air of state and cer- 
emony. The crimson and gold liveries of the 
Viceroy, and of the Governors of Bombay and 
Madras; the splendid body-guard of mounted 
Sikhs, well horsed, proud in bearing, all of them 
over six feet in height, with their turbans and 
lances; the crimson-lined state carriages, with 
two men in scarlet and gold on the box, and two 
standing on the foot-board behind, and always 
splendidly horsed, all this makes for the dignity 
and splendor that the Asiatic demands of his 
ruler. It may be absurd to the American, but 
there is no doubt whatever that a Viceroy in a 
cloth cap, on a bicycle, would ruin India in a 
month. We have prejudices the Oriental thinks 



60 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

silly; they have prejudices that we had best in 
charity and for safety's sake let alone. 

The administration of India in England is in 
the hands of a Secretary of State for India, as- 
sisted by a council of not less than ten mem- 
bers appointed for ten years by the Secretary of 
State. 

The executive authority in India itself is 
vested in the Governor- General in Council. 
The Governor-General, or, as he is more gen- 
erally called, the Viceroy, is appointed by the 
Crown, and holds oflfice for five years ; this term 
is sometimes extended. The salary of the Vice- 
roy is 250,800 rupees a year. The rupee is now 
worth one shilling and fourpence, or roughly 
thirty-four cents; the salary amounts therefore 
to about $84,000 a year; but I should be sorry 
to undertake the job and to pay my expenses 
out of that sum. 

The Council of the Viceroy consists of six 
ordinary members besides the Commander-in- 
chief of the army, and they are appointed by the 
Crown and hold office for five years. This 
Council is enlarged into a legislative council by 
the addition of sixteen other members appointed 
by the Viceroy under certain restrictions. 

Further, India is divided into nine provinces: 
Bombay, Madras, Bengal, Eastern Bengal, 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 61 

United Provinces, The Punjab, Central Prov- 
inces, North West Frontier Provinces, and 
Burma. The Governors of Bombay and Ma- 
dras are the most important officials after the 
Viceroy, and are appointed by the Crown, and 
each carries a salary of $40,000 a year. The 
Governors of Bombay and Madras have an 
executive council of two members of the Ind- 
ian Civil Service appointed by the Crown. The 
Lieutenant-Governors of Bengal, Eastern Ben- 
gal, United Provinces, the Punjab, and Bur- 
ma are appointed by the Viceroy with the ap- 
proval of the Crown; the Chief Commissioners 
of the Central Provinces and the Agent to the 
Governor-General who governs the North West 
Frontier Provinces are appointed by the Viceroy 
in Council. Of these divisions I visited seven, 
and in each I was impressed by the enormous 
amount of work being done, by the conscientious, 
often I thought too conscientious, way in which 
it was done, and by the dignity and fearlessness 
of the men who were doing it. If it were not 
for the too frequent interferences from the India 
Office, and the criticism from ignorant politi- 
cians, who shamelessly play India off for votes 
at home, it would be the most ideally managed, 
as it is the most successfully administered, de- 
pendency in the world. 



62 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

It IS curious to note that an agnostic even in 
oflBce is apt to be more sentimental in his deal- 
ings with men than the believer. As an avowed 
heretic he may wish to prove that he is even 
more merciful than the orthodox; or he may 
salve his conscience by assuming an exaggerated 
love for humanity as his love of God dwindles. 
To worship the God of the multitude must be a 
hard thing for the intelligent man, either in the 
West or in the East; but to turn from that to 
the flattery and adulation of the multitude itself 
is to proclaim oneself to all intelligent men, no 
matter what rewards and prizes are gained there- 
by, as a scoffer among scoffers, as scornful in 
the seats of the scorners. Conscience is so piti- 
less, that even to be a prince in an ochlocracy 
can hardly recompense the intellectual traitor; 
and surely a trained mind, laughing in its sleeve, 
will find a peculiarly painful punishment await- 
ing it somewhere. 

The misfortune of a dangerous illness brought 
us the good fortune to spend some two weeks 
as the guest of the Governor of Bombay. Here 
we saw housekeeping, as I saw it again later as 
the guest of the Viceroy at Calcutta, on the mag- 
nificent and dignified scale made necessary by 
the climate, the social demands, the high posi- 
tion of the host, and his unceasing and unending 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 63 

procession of guests. Very few of thera are of 
his own choosing or inviting, few of them indeed 
his personal friends, but Bombay is the door to 
India, and England has many friends all over 
the world, and for reasons of state, or courtesy, 
or of frank hospitality. Government House 
Bombay receives them all, some to stay a night 
or two, and all to lunch or to dine. Dinners of 
a dozen, or of twenty, or of seventy, night after 
night, and the dinner of seventy as well and as 
noiselessly served as the tete-a-tete dinner in our 
own sitting-room. At the head of this establish- 
ment the Governor of Bombay, with a besetting 
sin of toiling when he should be at play, at exer- 
cise, or in bed. 

The steward, or manager of an establishment 
as well conducted as this must be a housewifeic 
jewel of the Koh-i-noor variety. But that is 
behind the scenes. I can only speak of the re- 
sults. 

A man who has a province of 75,000 square 
miles and a population of over 15,000,000 to 
govern, including a city the size of Bombay, 
must have his hands full, and can spare little 
time for his guests and their entertainment. 

I had heard of the institution called an aide- 
de-camp before, and I have met them in other 
parts of the world ; but just as there are peaches 



64 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

outside of Jersey, strawberries elsewhere than in 
Maryland, clam-bakes elsewhere than in Fair- 
haven, Massachusetts, soft-shell crabs, oysters, 
terrapin, canvas-back ducks elsewhere than in 
America, but none quite so good, so if you would 
know the fine flower of aide-de-campship you 
must needs go to India. 

A man with as many strings to his bow as a 
governor of one of these great provinces must 
have many servants, capable, willing, and effi- 
cient, or the business would soon be in a tangle. 
These men must not only be capable, w^illing 
and efficient, they must be loyal, and if in ad- 
dition they like their chief, you have a corps of 
assistants approaching perfection. There is the 
Military Secretary, the Private Secretary, the 
Physician, and others, each with his duties. 
But besides their specific duties they are the hosts 
by proxy of their chief, and everywhere and at 
all times they are there to save him trouble and 
to make his work easy. 

Every day in your dressing-room before din- 
ner you find a type-written list of the guests you 
are to meet that night, and the name of the lady 
assigned to you to take in to dinner. Austrian 
and Polish nobles, Russian and French princes, 
German diplomats, members of Parliament, offi- 
cials, British and Indian, Royal Highnesses, all 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 65 

must be properly placed, and all must know who 
their neighbors are, and as a result what subjects 
of conversation may cause friction and are to be 
avoided. When all are assembled in the draw- 
ing-room, the aide on duty for that day appears 
with the Governor, whom he announces: His 
Excellency! That gentleman makes the round 
of the room, shaking hands with each, offers 
his arm to the lady entitled to that honor, and 
we go in to dinner where a score or more of 
turbaned servants, in crimson and gold liveries 
and barefooted, serve the meal. 

It is noticeable that the other Europeans are 
impressed by the stately and dignified way things 
are done by the British officials in India. The 
Governor is easily king, no matter who is there, 
and during my stay he entertained all sorts, in- 
cluding royalty and high diplomacy, renowned 
travellers, sportsmen, journalists, and statesmen. 
One gets an impression of the sturdy self-con- 
trol, of the patient mental power, which are the 
driving force behind the handful of Englishmen 
who hold this country. They have it in their 
blood, the best of these people, and these highly 
placed Englishmen almost without exception — 
I only met one exception, and the harm he 
does, although negatively, makes one gasp to 
think what would happen were there more like 



66 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

him — take the throne with an air of authority 
and a lack of self -consciousness, as of men sitting 
down for a chat with a friend. 

In these democratic days much ceremony and 
formality, a semblance of pomp, makes the ob- 
server uneasy very often lest something, so to 
speak, should come unstarched, or go wrong, 
lest the procession should be marred by a sense 
of unreality, and tempt one to titter. Not so 
here. Even after the novelty wears off, one is 
not impressed by the artificiality so much as 
more and more impressed by a growing feeling 
that this is not the simulacrum, but the reality 
of power. But it takes a big man to carry it 
off, England, by one of her blunders, still has a 
knot of them here in India. 

I have always thought that if I were not 
myself, or as Mr. Choate gallantly and wittily 
phrased it, could not be my wife's next husband, 
I should like above all things to have been the 
secretary to a great man, Cromwell, Hampden, 
Washington, Lincoln, Bismarck, and had a hand 
in the chosen doings of the picked giants of 
earth. 

It must be some such feeling as this which 
stirs in the breast of the ideal aide-de-camp. 
The aides of the Viceroy, of the Governor of 
Bombay, and of the Governor of Madras who 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 67 

in distinction from other officials in India re- 
ceive their commissions from the Crown, wear 
their aiguillettes of gold over the right shoulder, 
as representatives of royalty; other A. D. C.'s 
wear them over the left shoulder. A witty gen- 
tleman eating honey in the country turned from 
the dish and remarked meditatively: *'If I lived 
in the country I should certainly keep a bee!" 
If I lived in officialdom I would make any sac- 
rifice to keep an aide-de-camp! 

An aide-de-camp is a person whose business 
it is to be agreeable. His task is one requiring 
unceasing vigilance, good health, good looks, a 
kindly disposition, and not only manners, but 
what is the finer flower of manners, manner. 
His duties are so multifarious, his accomplish- 
ments necessarily so varied, that it seems at 
first glance a preposterous joke to propose to 
any one mortal that he should perform them, 
combine them, conceal them deftly, and not die 
of megalomania. 

He begins his day, let us say, at Government 
House, by taking a guest to ride at 7 a. m. — it is 
too hot to ride at any other hour. He cares no 
more for that particular guest than for the grand- 
sire of the horse he is riding, but he is a very 
clever and a very observant guest if he discovers 
it. As the clock strikes seven he appears, smil- 



68 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ing, shaven, clean, with a "I hope I have not 
kept you waiting!" He is full of such phrases 
as that by the way. Indeed he is an anthology 
of colorless and comforting phrases, not quite 
flattering, not quite humble, but partaking of 
both, which steep the unsuspecting in an aroma 
of superiority and security. He has listened to 
your banalities about horses and horseflesh, in 
the smoking-room the night before, with a cer- 
tain worshipful awe in his eyes, and you now 
find that he rides as though he were in a cradle, 
and you perhaps as though you were on a ship's 
deck. He modestly defers to you as to whether 
we trot, or walk, or canter, and he is ready to 
go on or stop, as best pleases you. He has a 
thousand things to do that day, and you nothing, 
but he is positively reckless as to time if only you 
are happy. If you will only waste his time, 
nothing apparently will give him greater pleas- 
ure. He leaves you at the door of your bungalow 
on your return with thanks for your company, 
and hope in his eyes and on his tongue, that 
you will favor him with your company again. 
You make what you consider a remarkably 
quick change and arrive at the breakfast-room. 
Apparently he has been there for hours. All in 
w^hite, booted and spurred, with aiguillettes over 
his shoulder, ribbons on his breast, for he is 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 69 

on duty to-day, no heat, no wilted collar, no 
single hair in disarray, he awaits you, and even 
his smile is cool and inviting. If there are many 
guests at breakfast or at luncheon he gently 
insinuates you into the room, but by his manner 
alone he transforms you into feeling like a whole 
procession, and you swell with satisfaction as he 
hands you to the best place vacant. He takes 
his place, with an expression, conveyed wholly by 
his corporeal attitude, as though to say: *'As for 
me, what matters it where I sit!" He succeeds 
by some curious personal magnetism, born I 
suppose of long practice, in giving you the im- 
pression that you are riding upon a very tall 
elephant, magnificently caparisoned, while he is 
standing in the street admiring you. 

After he has seen that you have your cigar or 
cigarette, and asked solicitously if you have seen 
the last Renter telegrams and the newspaper, he 
leaves you, but he leaves you in a delicious at- 
mosphere not of mere comfort, but of comfort 
that you begin to feel you have deserved by some 
effort of your own. There is a marked difference 
between common or garden comfort and A. D. C. 
comfort. The latter is lighted and scented with 
a certain subtle something that makes you feel 
that your state of languorous ease has been won 
by you after long and arduous toil; while as a 



70 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

matter of scientific fact, it is only the A. D. C. 
wand which has played upon your egotism, and 
made it seem for the nonce noble. 

If you wish to do an errand in the town before 
luncheon, he will either accompany you himself, 
or provide you with a companion. If he goes 
himself he instals you in the right-hand corner 
of the carriage or motor, in the place of honor, 
and you sail away, soldiers and policemen salut- 
ing, and others salaaming as you pass. He does 
not say it, but his air implies that these marks 
of respect are due to your imposing personal- 
ity, and not to the royal liveries. 

If a member of your party is ill, he never for- 
gets to send her flowers, to inquire for her health, 
and to suggest other comforts. 

He has done an hour's work before the morn- 
ing ride, and despite the air of idleness and the 
apparent contempt for time, he has done two 
hours' more work before the drive. 

This almost feminine regard for your com- 
fort, and the sight of him modestly curled up on 
a sofa at tea-time, like a stretching house cat, 
may lead you astray. Take him on at billiards, 
at racquets, at real tennis or lawn tennis, at polo 
or cricket or a day's shooting, or go through a 
day's hard ride in camp or at manoeuvres with 
him, and you find that he plays all the games 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 71 

you know and many more, and he beats you at 
all of them easily and apologetically. Among 
this knot of embroidered and decorative young 
gentlemen you may find a distinguished per- 
former upon the piano-forte, who will play you 
his own compositions; another who publishes 
fugitive poems; another who could easily make 
his living as a caricaturist; but none of these 
accomplishments is foisted upon you, rather are 
they dragged forth, or discovered by accident. 
None of them will speak of himself, or his do- 
ings, experiences, or successes, and one and all 
abhor lime-light upon themselves or their deeds. 
"What an education a little of their companion- 
ship would be for many of my countrymen, 
who after half an hour's acquaintance seem to 
fill the atmosphere with exclamation points, and 
repetitions of the ninth letter of the alphabet. 

On all official occasions, after dinner, or at 
dances, the A. D. C.'s attentions to the forlorn, 
the scraggy, the three-cornered, the convex- 
backed, the concave-chested, the self-conscious, 
the awkward, the acidulous of the opposite sex, 
would put the most fanatical Salvation Army 
captain to shame. 

I have grow^n to look upon A. D. Cship at its 
best, as one of the healing professions. It min- 
isters to the social soul diseased. It deals with 



72 THE WRST IN THE EAST 

the more hidden maladies of vanity, self-con- 
sciousness, social awkwardness, non-appreciated 
virtues, hypothetical prowesses, and soothes 
them unobtrusively, gently, and successfully. 
Chatterton, and Byron, and Poe might all have 
been saved by the ministrations of an accom- 
plished A. D. C. 

As for his relations with his chief, he sur- 
rounds him with a purring adulation which 
soothes irritation, and lays the dust of the small 
attritions and futilities of the daily task. He 
gives spiritual subcutaneous injections of con- 
fidence and courage; waves aside the phantoms 
of discouragement; lights up the dark places of 
dull duties ; and helps to fulfil the deeds in hours 
of insight willed, which must be done, like most 
severe tasks, in hours of gloom. 

If he really likes and respects his chief, his 
voice and mien are a veritable psean and halle- 
lujah of praise, when he appears before the 
guests and announces: His Excellency! You 
are at once prejudiced in the great man's favor, 
prone to believe that he is indeed Excellent. 

There is nothing mawkish about this loyalty, 
nothing effeminate. It is like the tenderness 
with which an engineer oils his great ship-pro- 
pelling machinery, or the gentleness and care of 
a sportsman for his guns. 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 73 

In a climate where the greatest discomforts 
come from the heat, and the entomological off- 
spring of the heat, the houses are built for cool- 
ness and for shade. At Government House 
Bombay, there is a large central bungalow con- 
taining the drawing-rooms, dining-room, billiard- 
room, ballroom, smoking-room, the entertain- 
ing-rooms in short, and surrounding it are the 
bungalows containing the living apartments of 
the Governor, his staff, and his guests. We 
were royally housed in a bungalow overlooking 
the bay, with reception-hall, sitting-rooms, bath- 
rooms, and bedrooms, and with separate en- 
trances and outer halls. The service is at first 
uncanny, so noiseless are the barefooted attend- 
ants. You wash your hands in your dressing- 
room, and almost before you are out of the room 
a silent brown man has slipped in to change the 
water. 

Servants are of course cheap as measured by 
our standards, though by no means as cheap as 
they were twenty-five years ago; but they are 
also so bound, partly by caste rules, partly by- 
lethargy, partly by centuries of habit, that it re- 
quires many of them to keep the household ma- 
chine going, even when it is of modest propor- 
tions. In the case of the Governor of a great 
province or more particularly in the case of the 



74 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Viceroy, the number required is legion. No 
one of them will undertake another's task, and 
the social and religious differences between 
them are so great that there are no illustrations 
from x\merican life that w^ill serve to mark them. 
Between the low-caste sweeper of the garden 
walks and the Sikh soldier on guard at the front 
door, for example, there is a social difference not 
of degrees but of latitudes. It is criminal to 
think of associating together. 

We must not forget that we are among people 
here in India who though starving will throw 
away the meal with contempt upon which even 
the shadow of a low-caste man has fallen. We 
should remember too that these peculiarities of 
caste are not uncommon even among ourselves. 
The writer of Genesis recalls that the custom 
existed in Egypt "because the Egyptians might 
not eat bread with the Hebrews; for that is an 
abomination unto the Egyptians." When Joseph 
entertained his brethren in the house of Pharaoh 
the Egyptians ate apart, the Hebrews ate apart, 
and Joseph ate apart, much as the Maharana 
of Udaipur would do to-day did he entertain 
strangers and inferiors. I know more than one 
continental Catholic who has never to his knowl- 
edge sat at table with a Jew; and we all of us 
eat, and drink, and are friendly with people 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 75 

whom we do not ask to break bread with us 
at our own tables. These Indians have their 
caste prejudices, so have we, and when analyzed 
the differences are of degree rather than funda- 
mental, and so likewise are the eccentricities of 
housekeeping in the East or the West; there are 
difficulties to contend with on both sides of the 
world. 

Bells and mechanical appliances are not nec- 
essary, for at any hour of the day or night you 
clap your hands, and there glides noiselessly into 
your presence a brown phantom to do your bid- 
ding. All the work of every kind is done by men, 
except the sweeping of the leaves by one or two 
women in the garden. They all seem, if one may 
judge from appearances, not only contented but 
proud. Good behavior means fixity of tenure, 
and ultimately a pension. Tipping fairly, when 
there are so many, is impossible. The visitor 
finds a notice in his apartments asking him not 
to fee the servants, but calling attention to a 
box, into which he may put a contribution 
if he wishes. This contribution is added to 
the Pension Fund. The same justice, and 
honesty, and impartiality which hold all India, 
hold even more effectively here, because in the 
case of servants they come into closer contact with 
their masters, and in many cases like them as 



76 THE AW.ST IN THE EAST 

well as respect tlieni. John Nicholson was not 
only a hero among his w^hite fellows but a hero 
too, to his soldiers and servants. His great 
height, his flowing beard, his dignity of bearing, 
and audacious courage so delighted the Sikhs 
that a sect of them called themselves by his 
name, and established him as their Guru, or 
priest. 

Among other letters, I had a letter to a dis- 
tinguished Hindu, who has won high rank in the 
judiciary of India. I spent a long day in the 
courts with him, and on one occasion I sat 
through a scene which I shall never forget. The 
buildings used by the court in Bombay are larger 
and finer than those in New York, and the judges 
better paid than even our judges of the Supreme 
Court of the United States. The case was one 
of appeal from a decision of the low^er court con- 
demning two Hindus to death for murder. It 
was a disgusting story, and most of the evidence 
was circumstantial, except that of a lad of six- 
teen, a decadent, who claimed that he had been 
forced by the others to take part in the crime. 
There sat a Hindu judge, and beside him an 
English colleague; the case was argued for the 
appeal by an English barrister. Many hours, 
much money, much investigation and sifting of 
evidence had gone into this dull matter of the 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 77 

guilt or innocence of these three Hindus of the 
very lowest caste. The British machine was 
working as carefully, as minutely, as though great 
personages, or important matters of state were 
at stake. It was an object-lesson of the slow, 
ponderous English way of being just. It was a 
sledge-hammer to crack an egg, but it was justice 
for those cow-herds, w^ho possibly earned two or 
three cents a day, and justice as nice, and care- 
ful, and impartial as for a prince. In the old 
days their ruler w^ould have had their heads off, 
or their brains and bellies crushed to a jelly be- 
neath an elephant's feet and knees, or sent them 
about their business in five minutes, and nor the 
victims, nor their friends, nor any one else would 
have thought anything more about it. 

In a country where lying and deceiving are 
looked upon as an intellectual employment as 
worthy as any other; in a country where a man 
wall murder his ow^n child and bury it in his neigh- 
bor's garden to fasten suspicion upon him, it is 
easy to realize how difficult is justice, and how 
experience alone can weigh evidence and get 
the truth from witnesses. It is sciolism worse 
confounded to wTite letters and pamphlets from 
cosy chambers in London or New York on the 
subject of justice in India, the tyranny of the 
police, the haughty English official, and kindred 



78 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

criticisms. I have visited courts and prisons, I 
have sat in the highest court, and also in front 
of the deputy-commissioner's tent pitched on the 
plains of the Punjab, on a hot day, and thus seen 
justice meted out to the high and low, and to all 
conditions of men and women, and now that I 
am far away from it all, I marvel even more than 
I did then at the patience, forbearance, kindli- 
ness, and impartiality that I saw. 

My distinguished Hindu friend was of the 
Brahman class, who had been educated in Eng- 
land and thereby, by crossing the black water, 
outcasted. He belonged to the intellectuals of 
his creed, and told me he was what we should call 
a Unitarian. He praised the virtues of the Hin- 
dus, said they were peaceable, gentle, mild, but 
also suspicious, envious, and jealous, and easily 
excited by playing upon their religious fears, 
when they lost all sense of the justice and honesty 
of their rulers, or of anybody else, and became 
cruel. The Hindus, he said, have as a rule but 
one wife, taking another only in case the first one 
bears no children, or, among the lower classes, 
that there may be more people to work the land, 
and this in spite of the fact that their religion 
does not forbid polygamy. 

He maintained, as did every Indian of the 
scores I talked with, that caste is the curse of 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 79 

the country, keeping people apart, setting them 
against one another, and that so long as caste 
exists there is no hope of self-government. 

He thought the British did not see enough of 
the people, were socially exclusive, and thereby 
barred from understanding the people they lived 
among. I said that all Englishmen made the 
same remark, that the Indians are inscrutable, 
mysterious. He denied this, and said that they 
were quite understandable, and would talk freely 
and frankly, but that they were not allowed to be 
on such terms with the English as permitted free- 
dom and frankness of intercourse, and that there- 
fore they were dubbed inscrutable. He said the 
feeling between Hindus and Muhammadans was 
as strong, and in some places as bitter, as ever. 

He thought some protection would be good for 
India, for of course with free-trade, India was at 
the mercy of Lancashire. 

He was in favor of as much participation in 
the government by natives as was possible, and 
held that education was making progress even 
among the women. He showed the same feeling, 
though very guardedly expressed, that other in- 
telligent Indians show wherever one meets them, 
that much of the distrust and dread of the Ind- 
ian for the English are due in great part to the 
unsympathetic attitude of the majority of the 



80 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

English, and claimed that confidence and sympa- 
thy would be repaid by loyalty and frankness. 

We discussed the curious contradictoriness of 
the English, who insist upon the unearned in- 
crement theory as applicable to land in India, 
though they fight it at home; and who support 
the theory of native princes in India, with their 
patriarchal influence and methods of govern- 
ment, while denouncing dukes and great land- 
lords at home. We agreed upon one thing, that 
the subtilties of British compromise were be- 
yond us. 

I quote this gentleman, as I shall quote others, 
not because I agree or disagree with all their 
views, but that my readers may grind each his 
own axe. As for me, I beg to emphasize the 
fact that I have no axe to grind other than to 
call the attention of my countrymen to problems 
and situations that they are marching toward, 
and that rapidly. 

At a dinner given for me by the Chief- Justice, 
we dined at a new club where both Indians and 
British meet. Indeed, it was formed for that pur- 
pose, and certain already hard-worked English- 
men whom I met make it a point to go there. 
At the dinner in question only men were present, 
and there were as many Indians present as Eu- 
ropeans, and it seemed to me that problems 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 81 

of government and politics were discussed as 
freely as they would have been in New York or 
in London. 

But when one leaves this atmosphere of the 
high-placed, to spend many hours in the part 
of the town inhabited by the Indians themselves, 
the practical situation seems to swamp the the- 
ory completely. What sympathy, what kind- 
liness, what understanding of their needs or of 
their defects can permeate this mass ? Even 
my Hindu friend, when pressed for an opinion, 
admitted that he saw no solution except British 
domination for centuries to come. Just what 
your eyes see, just what your ears hear, make 
you almost contemptuous of the most intelligent 
man's opinion who has not actually been in In- 
dia. These streets swarming with people ; these 
shops, which are merely large-sized goods boxes 
with one end taken off, in which are huddled 
merchants and their families and their wares, in 
a cubic space perhaps twice that occupied by a 
deer-hound when travelling in his huge basket 
to a show; the variety of costumes, head-gear, 
and physiognomy, I was told that forty different 
dialects are spoken in the bazaars of Bombay, 
distinctions of class apparent even to my untu- 
tored eyes, from the man in a loin-cloth to 
some petty raja in a gilded coach, with servants 



82 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

swarming over it and around it, or dainty Parsi 
women taking their airing in well-turned-out 
carriages, with footmen clearing the way for 
them; beggars covered with dust and ashes; 
Arabs and students, what a mixture it is! 

Nor democracy, nor any other form of govern- 
ment, has done away with social differences, for 
the form of government is yet to be even dreamt 
of that can endow men with equal patience, equal 
industry, equal good judgment, and until that 
time comes, society will be as little level as the 
troughs and crests of the ocean. Even in the 
West, where religion and politics have assumed 
the livery of Equality, little has been done; but 
in the East religion and politics for thousands of 
years have insisted that justice demands inequal- 
ity, and from Quetta to Calcutta, and from Ma- 
dras to the Khaibar Pass, there is no sign that 
the old ways are passing. 

A journalist whom I met in Bombay, who, 
though he was not an anarchist, was none the 
less voluble in his criticisms of the British meth- 
ods of rule, was discussing the recent visit of Mr. 
Keir Hardie to India, and I remarked that he 
was a curious leader for a Brahman to follow. 
*'We do not follow him," he replied, "we are 
only using him as we should use anybody else 
who will follow us! The men he influences," he 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 83 

continued, "are of little use to us, but they are a 
nuisance to the British." 

There are over a thousand newspapers pub- 
lished in the vernacular in India in over twenty- 
two dialects or languages. In the large cities 
like Bombay, and to some extent in the outlying 
districts, they have a certain influence, not al- 
ways, I fear, for good. 

But if the East is buried deep in its own su- 
perstitions, we are obsessed by ours. Education 
and teaching are two of ours. The misty talk 
about teaching people to respect themselves is a 
very loose phrase. To teach Lincoln to respect 
himself was to increase his respect for patience, 
for humility, for good-humor; to teach John 
Nicholson to respect himself was to increase his 
respect for truth, courage, and duty; on the 
other hand, to teach a forger to respect himself 
is to make his next forgery more daring; to teach 
a thief to respect himself is to make his next 
loot larger; to teach certain firebrand politicians 
to respect themselves, either in India or in Eng- 
land, is to increase their respect for jaunty om- 
niscience, for second-hand scholarship, and for 
the sly sedition of the bomb, the pistol, and the 
vernacular press. 

To teach a man to read, or to write, or to 
count does not teach him to think, or to know. 



84 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

We tried teaching our Indians ; England teaches 
in India — under the aegis, by the way, of the 
most absurd Macaulayan and antiquated system , 
the system of a man as contemptuous and ig- 
norant of Eastern literature, religions, and phi- 
losophy as he was accomplished as a maker of 
historical phrases and liter'ary antitheses — but to 
little avail, for the reason that few of us as yet re- 
alize the limitations of education. The Indian 
senior wrangler is no more morally an Englishman 
than he was before he knew the English alphabet. 
You cannot teach character, no matter how much 
else you teach, and character is the only thing 
worth while. Men are only of the same class, 
of the same moral aristocracy, when their blood 
boils and freezes at the same moral temperature, 
and in all the world there is no text-book on that 
subject, and but few teachers. 

Much of the confusion in this matter arises 
from the fact that we confound training and edu- 
cation. The majority of men who go through 
schools and universities get no training at all, 
and fail and are forgotten; the men who do get 
the training in schools and universities make it 
appear that it was altogether due to school and 
college, which is not the case at all. It w^as train- 
ing that produced Washington, Hamilton, Lin- 
coln, Grant, Sheridan, "Stonewall" Jackson, 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 85 

and Lee, and not education in any academic 
sense, though Hamilton, Jackson, and Lee were 
students. It is not the learning that makes the 
man, but the man who uses his learning as a 
gymnasium in which to train his powers. We 
go on crowding men into state and philanthropy- 
supported institutions of learning as though they 
were magical receptacles for the production of 
trained men. Years of failure have taught us 
nothing. 

I agree that the state ought to supply the op- 
portunity for elementary study, and that it is 
wise and generous charity which offers oppor- 
tunity for high and costly experiment and in- 
vestigation, but only those who earn their way 
ought to have the path beyond made easy. 
Luther, and Erasmus, and Bacon, and the lesser 
breed of intellect, will blaze their own paths 
through the forest of difficulties; the others 
should not be pampered into intellectual daw- 
dling, but left, and even forced if necessary, to 
fell the forest and plough the plain. 

America has had free education from the be- 
ginning, an unequalled test, and yet the men 
who have made America are without university 
degrees, with such few exceptions that the aca- 
demically educated are lost in the overwhelm- 
ing majority who have trained themselves. Even 



86 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

those who have academic degrees owe their 
places in the world to other training than the 
training received from books and professors. 

The world wonders at the decadence of school- 
beridden France, where the boys are effemina- 
tized, the youths secularized, and the men ster- 
ilized, morally and patriotically; France with 
its police without power, its army without pa- 
triotism, and its people without influence; dis- 
orderly at home and cringing abroad; a nation 
owing its autonomy even, to the fact that it is ser- 
viceable as a buffer-state. When I write "disor- 
derly at home," it is not the off-hand rhetoric 
of the hasty writer. Monsieur Emile Massard 
made a report to the Paris Municipal Coun- 
cil on the subject of the encumberment of the 
Paris streets. He says there are nearly half a 
million vehicles of all kinds in Paris to-day, with 
twenty thousand hand-carts and nine thousand 
barrows. In 1909, sixty-five thousand eight hun- 
dred and seventy accidents were caused in the 
Paris streets by eighty-one thousand eight hun- 
dred and sixty-eight vehicles, or about three ac- 
cidents for every four vehicles, and there was one 
summons for every seventy-seven motor taxi- 
cabs. I am unorthodox, I might even be dubbed 
a heretic by the narrow, but I am bound to con- 
fess if ever a nation suffered from physical and 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 87 

moral dry-rot, as a direct result of secular ed- 
ucation, it is France. 

America and Germany have been saved from 
this by faith and reverence. In France reverence 
has been knocked on the head and faith smoth- 
ered in ridicule, and she has produced a school- 
bred hooligan, in Paris at any rate, whose lack 
of the human traits of decency, honesty, gentle- 
ness, and manliness are unequalled outside of 
a menagerie. Heretic I may be, but I would 
rather suffer a Mass even, than mock at my 
mother country. 

Education without moral training is simply 
a diabolical misfortune. But the fallacy re- 
mains, and with it a terrible waste of human 
material, and an increase of that uneasy unhap- 
piness which is the curse of modern society; for 
men and women are naturally discontented who 
feel dimly that they are developed along wrong 
lines, and yet are loath to admit that they should 
exchange the black coat for the blouse, the pen 
for the plough, and the anaemia of mediocre men- 
tal accomplishment for the health of rude toil. 
There is a multitude of failures at these Ind- 
ian examinations. It takes twenty-four thousand 
candidates for matriculation to secure eleven 
thousand passes, and of these eleven thousand 
only one thousand nine hundred survive to take 



88 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

the B. A. degree. At Oxford, for example, and 
as a means of comparison, the number of those 
who fail to matriculate is negligible, and of the 
nine hundred who annually matriculate, about 
six hundred and fifty proceed to their degree. 
In the long run, God himself readjusts matters. 
Development along false lines ends in disgrace 
and failure. We to-day may see Turks and 
Italians, the descendants of the Mughals and 
the Caesars, working as day-laborers in the far-off 
West of the Argentine Republic, and five hundred 
years hence a Chinese official will ponder over 
the fact that the descendants of English lords 
and American millionaires are tilling his fields. 
By instinct we say "Mother Earth" and ''Mother 
Nature," and we are right; all the others are 
step-mothers, or mothers-in-law. 

It is curious that England, which has won so 
great an empire, and which has been ruled and 
served by an uneducated but trained aristocracy, 
should of all nations turn to books and profes- 
sors to solve its Indian problems. In the House 
of Commons, July, 1910, there were one hundred 
and eleven Etonians, the great majority of whom 
are far better fitted to lead a squadron of cavalry, 
or to govern a foreign province, than to pass an 
examination in competition with Frenchmen or 
Germans of their own age. I hope I am not as- 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 89 

suming too much when I say that these same 
Etonians would agree with me. 

India needs engineers, agricultural chemists, 
archaeologists, mining engineers, architects, stat- 
isticians, students of hygiene, political econ- 
omists, scientific farmers, but how many such 
men have her schools and colleges produced? 
Practically none. All this work is done by Eu- 
ropeans, while the Indian student has but one 
aim: to become an employee of the government, 
a cog in the wheel of bureaucracy, with a little 
power over his fellows, and a pension in store for 
him. The supply of these students is exceeding 
the demand, and those left over are like badly 
cooked food, neither good as a fertilizer nor to 
eat; they are spoiled for the fields and too feeble 
for useful mental labor. I mean no insult. I 
am saying of the East what I have first said 
of the West. England has transferred the West- 
ern fetich of secular education to India, with the 
result that might have been expected. The 
Indian seditionist is no worse ^than the Parisian 
hooligan, and both, with certain differences, 
are the result of the same system. 

The sun is blazing down on the garden in 
which lives a saint, so-called, whom I visited one 
day in Bombay. He has not spoken for twenty- 
three years, and his neighbors look upon him 



90 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

with awe. He permits me to take his photo- 
graph, and I wonder whether it is for peace or as 
a penance that he has made this law for himself. 
We question him, and he by signs tells us that he 
is quite happy, quite indifferent whether he lives 
or dies, and quite sure that all is for the best in 
the world, if one only takes a perspective of, say, 
a thousand years or so. We are too close to 
things to know much about them, he maintains, 
and gets as far away as he can. 

Some months later, I visit at Davos Platz a 
man who for nearly thirty years has been study- 
ing drops of blood under a microscope. He is 
getting as close to life as he can, but admits that 
he knows little more than the sage in his hot gar- 
den at Bombay. Both the Western scientist and 
the Eastern sage smile indulgently at the fussi- 
ness of modern life. My own experience of men 
in many lands has taught me that the most ac- 
tive are the least valuable. It is a notable sur- 
vival of the simian in man, that so many people 
think that constant mental and physical activity 
is a measure of value. Busy people seldom ac- 
complish anything. The statue, the poem, the 
painting, the solution of the economic, financial, 
or social problem, the courage and steadfastness 
for war even, are all born in seclusion and appear 
mysteriously from nowhere. Cromwell, Wash- 



THE GATEWAY TO INDIA 91 

ington, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Dante, and Cer- 
vantes all appear from nowhere, and promptly 
take command of the busybodies. What a crowd 
of men we all recall who were so busy making 
themselves remembered that they are already 
forgotten! It is said that some ninety-five per 
cent of business men, brokers, and bankers fail. 
It is busyness that does it. We must give the 
Eastern philosophy its due. We are none of us 
infallible, not even the most modern of us, and I 
am not sure that the proud flesh of the social 
sore is not as visible in the Tweed Ring, in the 
State-House scandals in Pennsylvania, in the 
Sugar scales of certain millionaire merchants, in 
the Poplar Union revelations in England, or in 
the crowd at a race-meeting in Paris, as any- 
where in India or in China. 

I regret, for the sake of my Western readers 
who are accustomed to the proclamatory cock- 
sureness of irritable activity, that I am leaving 
Bombay with so little ability to provide them 
with any essence of omniscience of my own man- 
ufacture. Having no claims social, political, or 
financial to make upon my fellow-countrymen, I 
am satisfied to serve them with food for thought, 
rather than to denounce them for the benefit of 
their enemies, or to flatter them for their own 
undoing, that I may have their approval. 



Ill 

THE GREAT MUGHAL 

IT is much like trying to sop up the Gan- 
ges with a bath sponge, to attempt to give 
briefly, and yet satisfactorily, an outline of 
the history of India. If I were telling some one 
else how to thread the beads of such an historical 
sketch, I should suggest a series of names, names 
of men who have stood as corners around which 
the current of events has swirled. Buddha 500 
B. C; Asoka 257 B. C; Alexander 327 B. C; 
Kanishka 40 A. D.; Timur 1398 A. D.; Babar 
1482-1530; Akbar 1556-1605; Shah Jahan 
1628-1658; Sivaji 1627-80; Clive 1751-1767; 
Hastings 1773-1784; Ranjit Singh 1780-1839; 
Dalhousie 1848-1856; John Nicholson 1857. 

There are many omissions here, but from the 
time when India rises above the horizon of legit- 
imate history down to that Sir Galahad of the 
Mutiny, John Nicholson, who was shot through 
the heart at Delhi, with the words: ''Forward, 
Fusiliers! Officers to the front!" on his lips, 
one can grasp the main features by a study of 

92 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 93 

these biographies. Those last words of Nichol- 
son, too, leave one with a tingle in the blood, 
and a fine flavor of the nobility of English man- 
hood, which was never more wanted in India, and 
in England, than to-day. Some such thing 
must be done, however, to make any sketch of 
British rule, or of present conditions in India, in 
the least comprehensible. This is the more nec- 
essary when one hears, not only from those who 
have never visited India, but from those who 
have been there, suggestions and discussions 
which might lead one to believe that India had 
always been, and is to-day, a national entity like 
France, or Germany, or Italy. India is not in 
the least like Poland, battling for national ex- 
istence against Russia and Germany; not in 
the least like Italy delivering herself from 
Austria. 

India has never had any national existence 
whatsoever. India is even now, and always has 
been, as much divided into nations, states, races, 
religions, languages, as is Europe, or Asia, or 
Africa. The Sentimentalist, who, Meredith tells 
us, is "a perfectly natural growth of a fat soil. 
Wealthy communities must engender them," 
speaks, and writes of India, as though it had been 
enslaved by the British, robbed of its personality, 
starved in its natural national growth, shorn of 



94 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

its liberties, and deprived of any representation 
in its own government. 

It comes as a surprise therefore, particularly 
to the American, who must always listen sym- 
pathetically to tales of tyranny, particularly if 
the Briton be the tyrant, to find that India has 
never had a national personality, nor any natural 
national growth, nor anything approaching na- 
tional liberty, nor anything even dimly shadow- 
ing forth representative institutions, nor has she 
ever dreamt of individual liberty as we know it. 
Moreover, out of the three hundred millions of 
the population, two hundred and ninety millions 
at least do not know what these things mean, and 
do not care. The average Indian does not know 
that America has been discovered, he has no 
idea of the British constitution, or of the cabi- 
net, he does not know that there is a British 
Secretary of State for India. Such loyalty and 
knowledge as he may have, centre in three 
Lords: the ''Bara Laf or Viceroy, " Chota Laf 
Provincial Governor, directly over him, and the 
'^Jangi Lat** or Commander-in-Chief in In- 
dia. Most of them, however, only know the word 
Sarkar or the government. He lacks even an 
equivalent for the word "vote" in his language. 
He recognizes power, position, but has not the 
vaguest notion of ''majorities." A change of 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 95 

government to him means merely a change of 
ruler, another man in place of the old one. He 
knows nothing of changes of principle, of eco- 
nomic differences, of party cries. Government 
to him has always meant, and means to-day, au- 
tocratic power expressed in the person of a man. 
Only a tiny minority in India know anything of 
the whys and wherefores of the party govern- 
ment in England, by which they are ruled. 

Unless this profound ignorance of modern po- 
litical methods in India is clearly understood, 
and kept ever in the back of the brain in all dis- 
cussions of India and its peoples, misapprehen- 
sions and misunderstandings are sure to follow. 

The discussions, experiments, and agitations 
at the present time in regard to India, are lead- 
ing many people, both in England, where it 
is their duty to know better, and all over the 
Western world, to suppose that India as a whole 
is perhaps almost ready for representative gov- 
ernment. Those who know the actual condi- 
tions in India are trying to disabuse the minds 
of people of this error, but strange to say it is 
difficult. 

Lord Cromer said not long ago: "If they 
considered the immense diversity of race, re- 
ligion, and language in India, and also that 
they would be endeavoring to transplant to 



96 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

India a plant entirely of exotic growth and plac- 
ing it in very uncongenial soil, he must confess 
for his own part that he should be very much 
surprised if the legislative experiment did suc- 
ceed." Other experienced governors of alien 
races have said the same. 

Lord Curzon, whose opinion upon all matters 
relating either to the Near or to the Far East, 
must be received with respect, says: " The bulk 
of the peoples of India want, not representative 
government, but good government, and look 
to the British officers for protection from the 
rapacious money-lender and landlord, from the 
local vakeel (attorney), and all the other sharks 
in human disguise which prey upon these un- 
happy people." 

My own opinion as an observer from the out- 
side is, that the peoples of India are no more 
fit for representative government than are the 
inmates of a menagerie, and that were the Brit- 
ish to leave India for three months, India would 
resemble a circus tent in the dark, with the me- 
nagerie let loose inside. There would be no safety 
except for the cruel, and those who could hide; 
and there would be no security because there 
would be no shame. Tooth and nail and fang 
w^ould have full play again, and that callous 
cruelty, which, more than any other quality, 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 97 

stamps the Oriental as different from the Oc- 
cidental, would slaughter the strong, enslave the 
weak, and market the women for the harem or 
the plough. 

The very men who study chemistry in Lon- 
don, under the protection of British law, in or- 
der to learn how to make bombs, to hurl at an 
English Viceroy and his wife, and who are the 
most vociferous pleaders for representative gov- 
ernment, would be the first to hide, and the first 
to suffer; aside from that I can see no advantage 
in opening the doors of the cages for many years 
to come. 

One of their stanchest friends, and one of 
their most brilliant British rulers, and a scholar 
in all matters pertaining to the politics of the 
East, writes out of his almost unequalled expe- 
rience as traveller and ruler: *'in character a gen- 
eral indifference to truth and respect for suc- 
cessful guile, in deportment, dignity, in society 
the rigid maintenance of the family union, in 
government the mute acquiescence of the gov- 
erned, in administration and justice the open 
corruption of administrators and judges, and in 
every-day life a statuesque and inexhaustible 
patience, which attaches no value to time, and 
wages unappeasable warfare against hurry." 

It is idle for the Westerner to attempt to form 



98 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

political or social opinions about these people 
till he has dwelt among them, watched them, 
studied them. Their clumsy inefficiency physi- 
cally, their depressed mental attitude, their shiv- 
ering timidity, their sullen solemnity, I am writ- 
ing, of course, of the mass of the people, are 
beyond anything the Western imagination can 
picture. It is not only idle to attempt to form 
opinions, let me go further, and say that I hold 
it cruel to the people themselves, to attempt to 
irritate them into the belief that they can, for 
scores of years to come, undertake to take care 
of themselves politically, socially, or morally. 
Every man of humane instincts ought to be 
grateful that they have at last a guardian who is 
honest, just, self-controlled, and lacking some- 
what in sentiment and imagination. 

Two hundred and fifty millions of this popu- 
lation are entirely dependent upon agriculture 
for a living, and Lord Curzon himself has esti- 
mated the total annual income of the Indian 
peasantry at a trifle over five dollars a head! 

India has an area of more than one and a half 
million of square miles, and a population of, 
roughly, three hundred millions. Her area in 
square miles is equal to the total area of Europe 
less Russia, and her population is greater than 
that of all Europe, less Russia. The great di- 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 



99 



versity of climate in India, the extremes of heat 
and cold, of drought and wet, of fierce winds and 
calms, and the consequent plagues, famines and 
crop failures, are the result of a peculiar geo- 
graphical position. If one could stand India up 
on end, the Himalaya mountains, with one peak, 
Mt. Everest, twenty-nine thousand feet high, 
would hang over the pear-shaped peninsula like 
a great, broad-brimmed hat. If you look at a 
raised map of India, you will see the resemblance, 
for the Himalaya mountains, which separate In- 
dia on the north-east from the great, barren 
plateau of Tibet, seem to hang over India like a 
huge, curling parapet. It looks as though the 
bare backbone of the world had protruded here. 
One hundred and fifty miles from the gulf of 
Bengal, where the Assam range of hills runs out 
into the plain, the rain-clouds bursting against 
these, give a rainfall of four hundred and fifty 
inches! Wliile to the west, in the plains of Raj- 
putana, there is scarcely water enough for a 
blade of grass. 

When camping out with the troops on ma- 
nceuvres, north of Lucknow, riding in the middle 
of the day was oppressively hot, but at eleven 
o'clock at night all the blankets and fur coats 
one could pile on, were not too much for com- 
fort. 



100 THE \VEST IN THE EAST 

The English have done much to bring about a 
certain regularity of water supply. Taking the 
country as a whole, one acre in seven is irrigated. 
Thirteen million acres are watered by wells, fif- 
teen million acres are watered from tanks, or 
small private canals, and seventeen million acres 
are watered by canals, built and maintained by 
the government. I am not an authority on such 
matters, but I am told that these irrigation works 
in India are not only triumphs of engineering 
skill, but the most beneficent works of the kind 
in the world. It is easy to believe this, when 
one realizes that the failure of the year's rain in 
India means that two-thirds of the population 
are out of employment for a year, with of course 
a consequent rise in the prices of necessary 
commodities. 

There are now in India over thirty thousand 
miles of railway, more miles of railway than has 
France, three times more than Italy, as much 
as Austro-Hungary, and only six thousand miles 
less than Germany. In 1857 there were only 
three hundred miles of railway. What must 
have been the helplessness of India in famine 
years, when there were no means of transporta- 
tion! If England had done nothing more, one 
must go slow in criticising her, when these canals 
and railways are remembered. 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 101 

She alone has fought grim Nature in India 
with the resources of science, with the result of a 
saving of millions of lives. No other conqueror 
spent his time, energy, money, and the lives of 
his own people, in such enterprises. Nadir Shah 
rode off with millions. Other conquerors did 
the same. England has poured millions into 
India, and the malcontents are grumbling be- 
cause she exacts in interest far fewer sovereigns 
than she has saved lives. Human beings at five 
dollars a head seem cheap enough! 

When we recall that crowded France has only 
a population of under two hundred to the square 
mile, and that even in overcrowded England 
wherever the density of the population is over 
two hundred to the square mile, the population 
ceases to be rural and must live by manufactures, 
mining, or city industries; what is the picture 
presented by India, where many millions of 
peasants are struggling to live off half an acre 
apiece. So wholly is this population agricult- 
ural, their one interest the tilling of the soil, that 
less than one fifteenth of them live in towns with 
more than twenty thousand inhabitants. 

India is a continent, and not in any sense 
a nation. Travel from Bombay, let us say, to 
Peshawar, and from there drive into the Khai- 
bar Pass, and as you travel you see people as 



102 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

different from one another as though you trav- 
elled from Seville to Moscow, or from the City 
of Mexico to Vancouver, and yet this is all 
India. 

The error lies in confusing the idea of India, 
in talking of, or discussing India, as though In- 
dia were like Spain or Germany, like Mexico or 
Canada. She not only has layer after layer of 
races, but also layer after layer of religions, of 
forms of government, of customs and of ideals, 
and prejudices. You are not dealing with one 
nation, nor with one religion, nor with one ethical 
code, nor with one language, nor with one gen- 
eral trend of social custom, but with scores and 
scores of them. There are half a dozen different 
languages, and over five hundred different dia- 
lects. 

Not to know something of all this, and some- 
thing of India's previous history, is to read of 
India, and to travel in India, with the mind 
blindfolded. 

Social as well as all other phenomena have two 
aspects, the dynamic and the static; the former 
dealing with the forces which brought the phe- 
nomena into existence, the latter dealing with 
them as they exist. A sketch of the history of 
India will help with the former, and travel in 
India itself ought to tell us something of the lat- 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 103 

ter. But either alone avails little to understand 
the problem. 

India has been the great jousting-ground of 
the world. Whoever would break a lance during 
the last twenty-five hundred years or more, was 
tempted by the tales of fabulous wealth, of con- 
cealed treasure, of rivers whose sands ran gold, 
to arm himself and set out for India. Greeks, 
Persians, Turks, Tartars, Mongols, Scythians, 
Afghans, Arabs, the Dutch, the French, the Por- 
tuguese and the English, and odd tribes besides, 
have sallied into India at one time or another, to 
conquer, to pillage, or to slaughter. Some of 
these left traces of their blood, some of them 
their buildings, and others their colonies. Till 
the British came, they brought, and they took 
away everything, except peace. 

The British, whatever may be said of their 
motives for coming, or of their methods of tak- 
ing and keeping territory, were the first conquer- 
ors who brought peace and administered equal 
justice to all. Both justice and peace are so 
new to India, that their very novelty is the foster- 
mother of many of the problems which confront 
England in India to-day. Alexander the Great, 
Asoka, Tamerlane or Timur the Lame, Mah- 
mud of Ghazni, Babar, Akbar the Great, Nadir 
Shah, and many more, are of those who have 



104 THE \VEST IN THE EAST 

tested themselves and their followers, by a plunge 
into India. Some of the greatest names in Eng- 
lish history won their first distinction in India, 
and Napoleon would have followed Alexander, 
and landed in India after Egypt, had not his 
plans gone awry. As soon as a soldier suc- 
ceeded in consolidating his power, anywhere 
from China on the East, to Persia on the west, of 
the northern frontier of India, he swooped down 
upon India, penetrated as far into the interior 
as he dared, and made off with as much booty 
as he could carry. 

After the Greeks under Alexander, who en- 
tered India in 327 B. C, and who, by the way, 
left traces of their art in the various vases, coins, 
caskets, and other ornaments found since, and 
also in the fine Greek features of many of the 
images of Buddha, came a people from Central 
Asia, whom the historians, for want of a better 
name, call Scythians. They are said to have 
driven out the Greek dynasty from the Bactrian 
Kingdom on the northwest of the Himalayas, and 
at about the beginning of the Christian era they 
founded a strong monarchy in Northern India, 
and just beyond. Their most famous king was 
named Kanishka, and w^e shall hear of him later 
on as an enthusiastic disciple of Buddha. These 
Scythians continued to swarm across the Him- 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 105 

alayas, and into Northern India for several cen- 
turies, meeting and defeating, or being driven 
back by one after another of the Indian kings. 

As early as the middle of the seventh century, 
began the invasions of a people who left their 
mark upon India as no other people have done. 
Muhammad, who was born in 570 A. D., left 
to the world a fiery faith, with which the world 
is not done yet. The Bombay coast was near 
enough to tempt these religious soldiers, and on 
one pretext or another they began their inva- 
sions of India, which were to result finally in a 
series of Muhammadan rulers in India, such as 
India had not had before, nor will ever have 
again. 

Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India no less 
than seventeen times. After a quarter of a cen- 
tury of fighting his small kingdom of Afghanis- 
tan was increased to include the Punjab. These 
Muhammadan conquerors, who one after an- 
other down to the time of Babar 1482-1530 A. D., 
fought their way into more and more territory 
in India, were of the same religion, and the 
same fanatical enthusiasm as those who had 
fought their way through Asia, Africa, Spain, 
and into southern France, and whose capital at 
Bagdad was at one time the commercial, artis- 
tic, scholarly, and political centre of the world. 



106 THE ^^^EST IN THE EAST 

Stopped at last in France, the fury of conquest 
expended itself upon India. Names, dates, de- 
tails of their gradual occupation of, and sover- 
eignty over, almost the whole of India, will not 
be necessary to the readers of these papers. I 
have not the slightest intention of writing more 
than the scantiest outline of history, merely trust- 
ing thereby to give a setting for the rough picture 
which I am painting. But of six of these Mu- 
hammadan invaders, Babar, Hamayun, Akbar, 
Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb, it is 
necessary to know something to understand the 
India of to-day, even though one be only a trav- 
eller looking at monuments, and nervously trying 
to keep his finger on the right page of his guide- 
book as he goes along. 

Their influence, their monuments, their sys- 
tem of land tenure, revenue, and taxation, their 
customs and habits, and even their social moral- 
ity, remain visible to-day. Lucknow, Delhi, 
Agra, Benares, Lahore, Peshawar, and the Khai- 
bar Pass, are still all alive with their wealth, 
their devotion, and their daintiness and daring 
as builders. 

Timur, better known as Tamerlane, at the 
head of a united body of Tartars, came down 
through the Afghan passes about 1400 A. D., 
entered Delhi, massacred the inhabitants for five 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 107 

days, held a feast in honor of his victory, and 
returned again to Central Asia. Sixth in de- 
scent from him was the Mughal, Babar, who in- 
vaded India in 1526. He writes in that remark- 
able Diary of his: ''Hindustan is a country that 
has few pleasures to recommend it. The people 
are not handsome. They have no idea of the 
charms of friendly society, of frankly mixing to- 
gether, or of familiar intercourse. They have 
no genius, no politeness of manner, no kindness 
or fellow-feeling, no ingenuity or mechanical in- 
vention in planning or executing their handi- 
craft works, no skill or knowledge in design or 
architecture, they have no good horses, no good 
flesh, no grapes or musk melons, no good fruits, 
no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in 
their bazaars, no baths or colleges, no candles, no 
torches, not even a candlestick." When Babar 
arrived he found India fought over by native 
Indian rulers, and by numerous Muhammadan 
rulers, fighting each for his own hand, or joining 
forces here and there in an effort to found a state 
which should insure breathing space. 

These kingdoms exhausted themselves in 
quarrels amongst themselves, to such an extent, 
that when the Mughal emperors appeared they 
found them an easy prey. Changiz Khan and 
Timur were both ancestors of Babar. His 



108 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

grandfather the Khan of the Mongols, though 
seventy years old at the time, came without 
thought of age or distance, to bear his congratu- 
lations on the news of his birth. The grand- 
mother was likewise a woman of spirit. Her 
husband was defeated in battle and she was 
handed over as part of the booty to one of the 
officers of the conqueror. She raised no objec- 
tions, but once her new master was in her apart- 
ments, the door was locked, she and her maids 
stabbed him to death and flung his body into 
the street. Then to the conqueror she sent the 
message: "Contrary to law you gave me an- 
other man, and I slew him. Come and slay me 
if you choose!" Babar had forebears of spirit. 
Babar kept a diary. He lived in the time of 
Henry VII and Michelangelo and Copernicus. 
He tells us in much detail the story of his life. 
Only from 1519 till 1530 was he in India. His 
early days were days of hardship, adventure? 
war, and sport. He took them as they came. 
He never whined, he never explained, and he 
loved life in a most unoriental way, and was the 
most romantic figure of his day. He was more 
the type of the adventurous sailors of Queen 
Elizabeth's day, than any Oriental we know. He 
was a great sportsman, a bold horseman and 
swimmer, and of abounding vitality and good 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 109 

humor. He loved life, even the eating and 
drinking part of it, and as is always the ease 
with such suitors, life loved him. From Babar's 
coming in 1526 to the death of Aurangzeb in 
1706, India was to a larger extent than ever be- 
fore, under one ruler. It should be added that 
at no time even then was India entirely con- 
quered, or completely under the sway of one 
Government, as it is to-day under the English. 

Babar defeated the Delhi sovereign, entered 
Delhi, received the allegiance of the Muhamma- 
dans, was attacked by the Rajputs, defeated 
them near Agra, and when he died his power 
extended as far south as lower Bengal. His son 
Humayun, who succeeded him, was obliged to 
divide his inheritance with his brother, handing 
over to him Kabul. It was from Afghanistan 
that Babar had drawn his fighting men, and 
Humayun deprived of this, the main recruiting 
ground of his army, was attacked by the descend- 
ants of those earlier Afghan invaders, who hated 
the new Muhammadan rulers as much as they 
hated the Hindus. Finally, after years of fight- 
ing to hold his place, he was driven out of India 
by the famous Sher Shah, the governor of 
Bengal. 

In 1556 the son of Humayun, then only four- 
teen years old, and in many w^ays the greatest of 



no THE WEST IN THE EAST 

all the Mughal rulers, and the real founder of the 
Mughal Empire in India, defeated the army of 
the Sher Shah ruler, and his father Humayun re- 
turned again to India, but only to reign for a 
few months at Delhi, and to die in 1556. 

Akbar succeeded his father, and reigned for 
close upon fifty years, from 1556 until 1605, his 
reign corresponding almost exactly to that of 
Queen Elizabeth, 1558-1603. He was the great- 
est ruler India has ever had. He welded a chaos 
of nations, tribes, religions, and petty chiefs and 
kings, into an empire. His great finance min- 
ister Raja Todar Mall, who was a Hindu, made 
the first survey and the first regular land settle- 
ment of India, and adjusted the taxation. Ak- 
bar gave the Hindus equal place and power, and 
played off the Hindus against the Mughal chiefs. 
He married the daughter of the Maharaja of 
Jaipur, and his son married the granddaughter 
of the Maharaja of Jodhpur. His careful system 
of police, judges, and rulers of provinces helped 
to make his rule both just and effective. He 
did away with the tax on non-Mussulmans, and 
he and his son and grandson were the builders 
of practically all the monuments which remain 
to make India famous to-day. 

This line of princes are as well-known in In- 
dia as are the names of Elizabeth, Henry the 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 111 

Eighth, Charles the First, and Crorawell in Eng- 
land. They introduced Persian poets and print- 
ers, and men of letters from foreign lands. They 
were the Medici of India. The last of this great 
line of Timur died in Rangoon, as a prisoner 
of the British, in 1862. Their connection with 
India lasted, therefore, for more than four hun- 
dred and fifty years, or from nearly a hundred 
years before America was discovered, until with- 
in two years of the close of the war of secession. 
The only time that India has come near being 
India was under their rule. 

It is along the lines laid down by Akbar that 
the British have worked, in the matter of land 
tenure and taxation. The total revenue of Ak- 
bar was estimated at forty-two million sterling, 
or about three times the amount demanded at 
the present time from the land. He built the 
tomb of his father Humayun near Delhi, the 
town of Fatehpur-Sikri, near Agra, in many 
ways the most interesting ruins in India, the 
fort at Allahabad, the palace at Lahore, and the 
red palace in the fort at Agra. 

It was the Europeans who visited India at 
this time who brought back the expression, which 
still endures as a description of human splen- 
dor: ''The Great Mughal!" Toward the end 
of his life, his tolerance drifted into scepticism. 



112 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

and he promulgated a new state religion, which 
was supposed to combine the best from all re- 
ligions, with Akbar as its prophet, or the head of 
the church. He was accused finally of even per- 
mitting worship of himself, a crime, be it said, 
of which great politicals are accused to this day, 
and we all know w^ith how little reason ! Akbar 
died in 1605, and is buried in the splendid tomb 
at Sikandra, some five miles from Agra canton- 
ment. 

It was during his reign that three Englishmen 
arrived with a letter from their Queen, Eliza- 
beth. They were John Newbery, Ralph Fitch, 
and William Leedes. John Newbery was lost 
somewhere on his travels, Leedes, who was a 
jeweller, remained as court stone-cutter, and 
Fitch returned to England. It was through his 
reports of the opportunities awaiting the trader 
in India, that the first commercial ventures from 
England were started. He it w^as in short who 
gave the signal for the formation of commercial 
companies to exploit India, with the result that 
India is governed by England to-day. 

Akbar was succeeded by his son Jahangir, 
who reigned from 1605 till 1627. He carried on 
a series of wars in southern India, and lost the 
province of Kandahar to the Persians. Jahan- 
gir turned from his father's new-fangled faith. 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 113 

and personally conducted ritual, to the orthodox 
observances of Islam. He must have been a wag 
of terrifying prowess, since it is told of him that 
after a night of drunken revelry with some of 
his courtiers, one of them reminded him the next 
morning of what had happened. Jahangir asked 
the man who his companions had been in such 
a disgraceful debauch, then called them before 
him and had them beaten so severely that one 
of them died. He himself died in the midst of 
a rebellion against him, led by his son Shah 
Jahan. Jahangir built the tomb of Anar Kali 
at Lahore, and the tomb of Itimad-ud-daulah 
at Agra, who was a Persian named Ghiyas Beg, 
Jahangir's father-in-law, and the grandfather of 
the wife of Shah Jahan, whose tomb is the most 
wonderful in the world. The mightiest factor 
for good in Jahangir's life was his wife, Nur 
Jahan. He loved her twenty years and then 
killed her husband to get her, and, what is per- 
haps more astonishing still, he never regretted 
it. In 1603 Sir Thomas Roe, the first English 
ambassador to India, presented his letters to Ja- 
hangir from James I. 

Shah Jahan was emperor of Delhi from 1628 till 
1658, just about the time the Pilgrims and Puri- 
tans were making their first settlements in Ameri- 
ca. WTiile they were building schools and 



114 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

churches of logs hewn into shape with the axe ; at 
about the time indeed when the oldest meeting- 
house in America, which has been used consecu- 
tively for public worship, was building, now 
kno^\Ti as the "Old Meeting-House/' in Hingham, 
Massachusetts, this Indian Emperor was plan- 
ning the building of the most magnificent capital 
in the world. No courtier in Delhi, or in Agra, 
and no citizen of Hingham at that time, imagined 
that the simple slate grave-stones in the cemetery 
at Hingham would mark the beginnings of a 
more lasting state than the jewelled tombs of 
Agra and Delhi. 

Toward the end of his father's reign, Shah 
Jahan was a refugee and a rebel, conspiring 
against his own father. After coming to the 
throne he murdered his brother, Shahriyar, and 
all the other members of the house of Akbar 
who might become rivals to the throne. Dur- 
ing the whole of his reign his armies were at 
work defending, attacking, and losing or winning 
territory. He is said to have been just to his 
people, blameless in his habits, a good financier, 
and by far the greatest man of his day in all the 
East. He built the Great Mosque or Jama 
Masjid, at Delhi, the Palace — what is now the 
Fort — also at Delhi, which contains the Court 
of Private Audience or Diwan-i-Khas, and the 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 115 

Pearl Mosque or Moti-Masjid. The famous 
Peacock Throne in his Audience Hall in the 
Fort at Delhi, with its tail shimmering in the 
natural colors of rubies, diamonds, sapphires, 
and emeralds, was valued by the jeweller Tav- 
ernier at thirty-five million dollars. If he had 
done nothing else, his name would have been re- 
membered in India, but he did more than this. 
He stamped the whole world of architectural 
beauty with his private seal when he built the 
Taj Mahal, 

Elsewhere one may read of the vivid incon- 
gruities of India, but what of this : I have just been 
the guest, at a splendid camp, where some seven 
hundred people were entertained for four days 
by one of the most enlightened native rulers in 
India. This ruler is a woman. Her Highness 
Sultan Begum of Bhopal. Here in India one 
finds a woman ruling with tact, with force, and 
with success. Here in India I have seen women 
actually catching in their hands the dung as it 
fell from the cattle, pressing it into cakes, car- 
rying it off on their heads, to dry it at home 
for fuel. Here in India too is the most marvel- 
lous memorial to a woman ever built by hu- 
man hands. Woman at her highest, woman at 
her lowest, woman immortalized, and all here in 
India. 



116 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

The Taj Mahal is the exquisite mausoleum 
built by Shah Jahan as a tomb for his favorite 
wife Arjmand Banu, called Mumtaz-i-Mahal, or 
*' Light of the Palace." It stands on a platform 
of marble, twenty feet high, and three hundred 
feet square. The tomb itself measures one hun- 
dred and eighty-six feet on each side, and the 
dome over the centre is two hundred feet high. 
It is one of the most wonderful things I have seen 
in the world. I saw it for the first time just as 
the sun was setting, leaving it with the purple 
curtain of the horizon all about it. It looked as 
though a Titan had taken a huge piece of ivory 
satin, embroidered it, encrusted it with jewels, 
stiffened it into shape, and set it in the sky. It 
seemed quite as though it might fade, or float, 
away. The first clod of dry earth that falls upon 
a coffin must seem like the weight of a planet to 
some one, but here are tons of marble and not an 
ounce. of weight. If you could blow bubbles of 
mother-of-pearl they would not shine more softly, 
or float more lightly, than the minarets and domes 
of this tomb. Here is a tomb that might float 
away with the spirit of the body to which it gives 
a home. It looks as though you might hold it 
up on your outstretched hand. 

It is the only building in the world that makes 
one wish to pat it, smooth it, touch it, as though 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 117 

it had the soft skin of a woman. It is not 
something you see; you feel it, hear it, taste it. 
I put my hand against the marble. It was 
warm, it seemed to have texture and quality, as 
though it were the covering of something alive. 
I have never seen any other building that re- 
sembled it, or reminded me of it — and only 
one woman. 

Inside, underneath the great marble dome, are 
the two marble tombs of Shah Jahan and his 
wife, and there the marble is like lace, so cun- 
ningly is it carved, with flowers inlaid in color, 
the colors being made of precious stones, agate, 
cornelian, lapis-lazuli. One can readily believe 
that it cost ten millions of dollars and twenty-two 
years of labor to make this casket. 

No other woman in the world has been praised 
in marble and jewels as is this woman, and no 
other woman ever can be. There have been 
greater men, and lovelier women, doubtless, and 
countless men who have loved as much, and 
many, no doubt, who have loved more, but every 
man who has loved a woman must envy this man 
for having done what he would wish to, but may 
not do! 

Around the two tombs is a screen of marble. 
You can look through it, as you can look through 
a cobweb. There are scrolls and flowers, and 



118 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

the petals and leaves of each flower are of col- 
ored precious stones, inlaid in the marble. 

We Occidentals use urns and crosses and 
broken columns. This man put a diadem of 
brilliants on the brow of memory, as if to say: 
This is not something buried or broken or to 
be forgotten, but rather something complete and 
never to be forgotten, and it never will be! He 
was right. When a man has really loved once, 
he has been eaten up by it. After that it does 
not matter how often, or how soon, he dies. 
*'Home is not a hearth but a woman." 

Poor Shah Jahan, as he had rebelled against 
his father Jahangir, so he in his turn suffered 
from the intrigues and rebellion of his family. He 
fell ill. His son Aurangzeb murdered his broth- 
ers, and proclaimed himself emperor in 1658. He 
imprisoned his father and kept him in close con- 
finement in the Fort at Agra till he died in 1666. 

I am sitting now, as I write, where Shah Jahan 
used to sit as a prisoner in his own palace. I can 
see the Taj Mahal, as he used to see it tw^o hun- 
dred and fifty years ago. 

As he looked across at those minarets and at 
that dome, he probably thought his life a fail- 
ure, and yet every man who sits where I am sit- 
ting must envy him such a success. All that the 
world of his generation had to give had been 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 119 

poured into a cup and lifted to his lips every day, 
and he had probably envied the man who was 
genuinely thirsty, that he might enjoy it. Now he 
is deserted and alone, and his cup, full of success 
and adulation, is in the hands of his rebellious 
son, who carries the key of his prison-house in his 
girdle, and mocks him. All he has left is his 
daily vision of the tomb of his wife, the Taj Ma- 
hal, One can pay this building no higher hom- 
age than to say that one envies Shah Jahan even 
then! 

There are other buildings in Agra. There is 
the great Fort, with its circuit of nearly a mile, and 
its huge sandstone walls nearly seventy feet high, 
built by Akbar. Within these walls is a mosque, 
also built by Shah Jahan, called the Pearl 
Mosque, the Hall of Public Audience, the Gem 
Mosque, used by the ladies of the court, the Hall 
of Private Audience, and the miniature mosque, 
called the Mina Masjid, in which the Emperor 
made his devotions, and the splendid sandstone 
palace, and so on. 

He must have revelled in building, and for- 
tunately there were eyes that dreamed beauty, 
and sure hands to make buildings of the dreams 
to do his bidding. No one before, and no one 
after, till the British took possession, was more 
completely master of India than Shah Jahan. 



120 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

The Mughal Emperors culminated in Shah Ja- 
han, and their pinnacle is the Taj Mahal, 

As long ago as 1398 Timur, or Tamerlane, as 
he is better known to us, poured his hordes of 
followers through the Afghan passes from Tar- 
tary. Shah Jahan's grandfather Akbar, was the 
sixth in descent from this barbarian warrior. 
One wonders who and what our first ances- 
tors could have been, who drifted over the world 
from Central Asia, and whose descendants built 
the Acropolis, the Forum, the cathedrals and 
churches of Italy and Prance, Germany, and 
England, and the Taj Mahal in India. At any 
rate one is proud to be of that Aryan stock. 

The last of this great line of Mughal emper- 
ors, who really held India together, was Aurang- 
zeb, who proclaimed himself emperor while his 
father Shah Jahan was still living. He ruled 
from 1658 till 1707. His reign began in rebellion 
against his father, and ended in the rebellion of 
his own sons against him. He devoted practi- 
cally his whole forty-nine years as a ruler to the 
conquest of southern India, and for the last half 
of the time he was in the field himself at the head 
of a huge, and what proved to be an unwieldy, 
army. 

A new power had sprung up in the south, 
known as the Maratha Confederacy, and Au- 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 121 

rangzeb, who had become a bitter and partisan 
Muhammadan, lost the friendly co-operation of 
Hindu generals and Hindu viceroys, who had 
helped to consolidate the Mughal power under 
Akbar. 

The religious sect of the Hindus, the Sikhs 
in the north, the Marathas in the south, and the 
Rajputs in the west, now hemmed in, and grad- 
ually dismembered, the great Mughal Empire 
in India. As we shall see later, it was from the 
Marathas and the Sikhs and not from the Mug- 
hals, that the British took control of India. Au- 
rangzeb by his stubborn policy put India again 
into the hands of bigoted Hinduism and big- 
oted Islamism, from which Akbar had wrenched 
it clear. 

While this great empire was falling to pieces 
in the hands of the feeble successors of these six 
great emperors, other enemies appeared. 

The Persian king. Nadir Shah, held a carni- 
val of slaughter and debauchery in 1739, last- 
ing nearly two months, in and around Delhi, and 
is said to have carried away with him booty, in- 
cluding the peacock throne, to the value of one 
hundred and fifty millions of dollars. 

The Afghans, time and time again, poured 
through the now unprotected passes, and burned, 
and sacked, and slew. The whole borderland 



P22 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

between northern India and Afghanistan was 
swept bare of wealth and of people, and lay bar- 
ren for years. It was during this time of an- 
archy, and internecine fighting, if fighting be- 
tween such diversified inhabitants of the same 
country may be described as internecine, that 
the British began patching together piece by 
piece, what is to-day their Indian Empire. While 
the others were quarrelling and fighting over re- 
ligious, social, political, and hereditary shadows, 
the British bull-dog walked off with the bone. 
He was not permitted to enjoy it in peace for 
years. The last war with the Marathas was not 
ended till 1818, and the Sikhs were not con- 
quered by the British till 1849. 

That eminent and satisfactory historian of the 
Indian peoples, Sir William Wilson Hunter, 
writes: "Akbar had rendered a great empire 
possible in India by conciliating the native Hindu 
races. He thus raised up a powerful third party, 
consisting of the native military peoples of In- 
dia, which enabled him alike to prevent new 
Muhammadan invasions from Central Asia, and 
to keep in subjection his own Muhammadan 
governors of provinces. Under Aurangzeb and 
his miserable successors, this wise policy of 
conciliation was given up. Accordingly, new 
Muhammadan hordes soon swept down from 



THE GREAT MUGHAL US 

Afghanistan; the Muhammadan Governors of 
Indian provinces set themselves up as indepen- 
dent potentates; and the wariike Hindu races, 
who had helped Akbar to create the Mughal 
Empire, became, under his foolish posterity the 
chief agents of its ruin." 

^Vhen Columbus discovered America, he was 
trying to find a sea-passage to India. He car- 
ried in his pocket a letter from his sovereign to 
the Khan of Tartary! 

When Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa, 
and discovered the sea route to India in 1498, 
he turned the whole current of power and com- 
merce. The Arabs had made Bagdad the centre 
of trade between the East and the Mediterranean 
nations. As early as the year 931 A. D., exam- 
inations of candidates for permission to practise 
medicine were held at Bagdad, which was 
already then a centre not only of commerce, 
but of culture. The Crusaders made certain 
Italian cities, Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, Venice, rich, 
because it was through them that these multi- 
tudes poured on their way to the East. They 
did the transporting of men and stores and 
horses. At the height of their power the Tabula 
Amalfitana were the sea laws for the whole Medi- 
terranean. ^yhen Pisa, Amalfi, and finally Genoa 
were subjugated by their rivals, Venice became 



124 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

the world's great sea-power, and also the centre 
of the world's commerce and the world's art and 
culture. Her ships covered the sea, and she 
numbered her sailors in tens of thousands. Find- 
ing that the through journey was too long, the 
Venetians arranged with the northern towns of 
Europe to make one town, lying between Italy 
and the traders of the north, a centre or store- 
house, where exchange of goods might be con- 
veniently effected. They agreed to make Bruges 
that centre, and thereafter Bruges in the north, 
and Venice in the south, handled the trade of 
the world. 

Vasco da Gama's discovery came like a magic 
wand to change all this. It was cheaper to trade 
by way of the newly discovered sea-route, and 
Lisbon, lying half-way between East and West, 
became the great market of the world, and by 
far the most potent Western factor in the East. 
There followed the tremendous war between 
Spain, which had conquered Portugal in 1580, 
and those great trading towns of the north then 
centred in Holland. For nearly a hundred 
years the war raged between Spain and Holland, 
and at the end of it, or the beginning of the sev- 
enteenth century, the Dutch were masters of 
the world. New York was Dutch, Brazil was 
Dutch, India was Dutch, and the Cape of Good 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 125 

Hope was Dutch, and of course the Eastern trade 
was Dutch. The Thirty Years' War and the 
civil war in England only made them stronger, 
till one wonders why the Dutch rather than the 
British did not become a great empire. 

But a "fat soil," a "wealthy community," 
bred a race of what would now be 9alled "Lit- 
tle Hollanders." No one, they thought, would 
dare attack the world-power which had swept 
Spain off the seas. No doubt there were poli- 
ticians to tell the people that the huge navy was 
an incubus, that more money was wanted for the 
poor, where so many were rich, and that the era 
of peace had come at last. Certainly that psalm- 
singing, devout Protestant across the North Sea, 
Cromwell, who was training an army and build- 
ing a navy, merely of course to protect the com- 
merce of England, was the last man to be sus- 
pected of designs upon Holland. Was he not 
continually saying that his army and his navy 
were merely brought into existence to preserve 
peace ! When all was ready, and the Dutch pol- 
iticians had succeeded in rendering Holland fully 
unprepared for war, this man of prayer, and 
psalm, and Bible, struck his blow in 1652, and 
Holland lost her empire, lost her mastery of the 
sea, lost her commercial supremacy, and all be- 
cause she was fat and rich. 



126 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

Cromweirs navigation laws were what are now 
known, and reviled, as high tariff laws. By 
Cromwell's Navigation Act all goods of every 
description, wherever grown or manufactured, 
were to l)e imported into Great Britain only in 
ships belonging to British subjects, of which the 
master and a majority of the crew were British 
born; and all goods produced in Europe must be 
brought into Great Britain either in British bot- 
toms, or in ships belonging to that country in 
w^hich they were actually produced. The Dutch 
were exporters of cheese, but had been carrying 
the trade of the world in their ships! 

It is easy to see against whom the new Navi- 
gation Act was aimed. There followed an enor- 
mous expansion in British foreign trade, which 
has never ceased to grow from that day until 
within the last few years. 

When a man arms himself with the Bible, and 
clothes himself in the shining armor of scripture, 
look out for him! One seems to be able to 
strike more suddenly, more unexpectedly, and 
more fiercely with that weapon than w^ith any 
other. 

England's greatness began and grew under 
Protection. France on land, and England on 
the sea, destroyed utterly the Dutch commercial 
supremacy, and then for a century England and 



THE GREAT MUGHAL U7 

France fought for the mastery of the sea, for the 
trade of the East, for commercial supremacy. 
Finally at Waterloo the mastery was gained, and 
the British Empire has had plain sailing from 
that day till within the last few years. 

There are few more exciting stories than this 
history of the fight for the commercial empire of 
the world, which ended in England's becoming 
the trader, the manufacturer, the ship-builder, the 
ship-owner, the banker, and the policeman of 
the world. It is a tempting task to fit in illus- 
trations, to make comparisons, to point to the 
beginnings of similar weaknesses, and parallel 
examples of rottenness here and there in the 
social and political fabric of other great imperial 
powers, which seem to unfold prophecies for the 
future, but I leave that to the Englishman. I am 
not his Cassandra. This whisp of the history of 
commerce is given here merely to introduce ''The 
Governor and Company of Merchants of London 
trading to the East Indies," better known as the 
English East India Company, or the "John 
Company," who started business with one hun- 
dred and twenty-five shareholders, and a capital 
of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. 
The man with that amount of capital is not 
considered a rich man in London or New York 
to-day. Nonetheless it was this trading com- 



128 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

pany who won, and held, and turned over to the 
British crown, the empire of India. 

The Portuguese and the Dutch fought them 
in the beginning, the French fought them later, 
and one power after another succumbed to them 
in India itself. By the middle of the eighteenth 
century all European opposition was at an end, 
and by the middle of the nineteenth century 
India itself was practically in their hands and 
under their control. To be quite accurate, 1783, 
and the peace of Versailles, marks the date when 
the maritime powers of Europe withdrew from all 
serious rivalry in conquest or commerce with 
England in India. After that date the contest 
is wholly between England and the native rulers 
for ascendancy in India. 

The jBrst territorial possession of the East In- 
dia Company was Madras, and the site upon 
which Fort St. George was built was bought 
from the Raja of Chandragiri in 1639. In 1661 
Bombay was turned over to the English crown 
by the Portuguese, as part of the dowry of Cath- 
erine of Braganza, the queen of Charles II., and 
in 1668 King Charles sold his rights to the East 
India Company for an annual payment of fifty 
dollars! In 1700, the company bought from a 
son of the Emperor Aurangzeb certain villages, 
which were united to form what is now Calcutta. 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 129 

Two men whose names are seldom mentioned, 
and rarely seen, gained for English commerce al- 
most the first legal foothold in India. The ship 
surgeon, Gabriel Broughton, who cured Shah 
Jahan's daughter when she was badly burned; 
when asked to name his fee, requested that the 
East India Company might be allowed to trade 
in Bengal free of all duty. 

The staff surgeon, William Hamilton, who 
when the court physicians had failed, cured the 
Emperor Farokshir of a tumor in the back in 
1715, asked for the thirty odd villages surround- 
ing the Company's factory near Calcutta, and 
for some villages near Madras, which gave the 
English control of both these ports. British 
commerce leaves Hamilton's tombstone neg- 
lected in Calcutta, and nobody even knows 
where Broughton's bones lie! 

The transfer of the supreme power of India 
from the grasp of the Great Mughal to this little 
company of English traders, makes a story as 
brilliant and adventurous as any story in history. 
The rise of British power in India virtually be- 
gins in 1745, and the two great names are those 
of Clive and Hastings. One died a suicide, and 
the other after an impeachment lasting seven 
years was completely impoverished. There are 
men in India to-day, and fine fellows they are. 



130 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

risking their health and their lives, and those of 
their families, to keep India for England, and 
there are almost as many voluble orators at home 
making it as difficult as they can for them. There 
are so many people nowadays who think this 
a topsy-tui-vy world because they are underneath, 
not realizing that the world would be upside- 
down indeed if they were not, that governing, 
particularly the governing of alien peoples, has 
become increasingly difficult. 

In the days of Clive and Hastings, and for 
about one hundred years after, there was no rail- 
way, nor cable, nor Suez Canal. The man on 
the spot was authoritative and responsible. The 
Oriental is still unable to understand divided au- 
thority, authority dictated from an unseen source. 
It may be safely said that had the present govern- 
mental machinery been in existence in 1745, In- 
dia might never have become a fief of the British 
Crown. It is sometimes fatal to interfere even 
when a man is making mistakes. Interference 
may poison the mistakes with lack of confidence, 
till they wilt into abject and costly failure. 
While mistakes may teach a man, interference 
always bewilders him and those under him. 

After the death of Aurangzeb, a new power, 
the Marathas, though of Hindu origin, with their 
home in the plains east of Bombay, overran, and 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 131 

practically took possession of, northern and cen- 
tral India. Sivaji, their great leader, began his 
pillaging crusades even before the death of Au- 
rangzeb. After his death a Brahman family, 
whose head took the title of Peshwa, led these 
people, and carried on for a hundred years a 
contest with the British. The great principali- 
ties of Baroda, Gwalior, Indore and Nagpur, 
the rulers of three of which I am shortly to visit, 
were the centres of this power. 

The Sikhs, now some of the best soldiers in the 
Indian army, also maintained for nearly seventy- 
five years a sovereignty of their own in the Pun- 
jab, and were only finally disposed of as rivals to 
the British in 1849. 

Of the Europeans, who from the beginning of 
the seventeenth century had attempted the ex- 
ploitation of the commerce of India, the Portu- 
guese, the Dutch, the Danes had disappeared, 
and w^hen Clive appeared upon the scene, only 
the French remained as formidable rivals. The 
battles of Wandiwash, of the famous Plassey, of 
Buxar, all fought between 1757 and 1764, ended 
the French rivalry, and the British were left to 
deal with the problem of subduing what remained 
of opposition in India itself. 

Another quarter of a century passed before 
Wellesley, later the great Duke of Wellington, 



132 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

finally disposed of the Maratlia confederacy ; and 
it was not till 1856, when Lord Dalhousie, prob- 
ably the greatest of all the governor-generals of 
India, having annexed the Punjab in 1849, took 
over control of the kingdom of Oudh, roughly 
the territory about Lucknow, that the map of 
India became what it is to-day. It was Dal- 
housie who wrote just before taking this grave 
step: ''With this feeling on my mind, and in 
humble reliance on the blessing of the Almighty 
(for millions of His creatures will draw freedom 
and happiness from the change), I approach the 
execution of this duty gravely and not without 
solicitude, but calmly and without doubt." The 
next year, 1857, was the year of the Mutiny! 

I quote this passage because I wish to call at- 
tention to what I believe to have been the secret 
of England's success in India. This success has 
been accounted for in many ways. It was com- 
mercial greed, say some critics ; it was brute force ; 
it was the leverage of power that Great Brit- 
ain had gained first in Europe, write the histori- 
ans. The first steps were, if you please, along 
the path of commercial greed, but later when 
the severe work of administration, pacification, 
and consolidation was done, it was quite another 
force that crowned the work. The civil service 
was recruited by examination from the Bible- 



THE GREAT MUGHAL 133 

reading upper and middle-class of Great Britain ; 
game-playing, adventurous and healthy, but at 
bottom duty-loving young barbarians, who be- 
lieved that India was delivered into their hands 
to be saved from itself. 

The first and foremost of them was Clive, a 
tall, silent, rather morose English lad, who began 
his career by accusing an oflficer of cheating at 
cards. There followed a duel. Clive missed, his 
adversary held his pistol to Clive's head and 
bade him beg for his life and retract his accusa- 
tion. " Fire and be damned to you ! I said you 
cheated and you did. I'll never pay you!" was 
the reply. 

There have been hundreds of lesser Clives in 
India since that day, and to them is due the con- 
quest and peaceful government of India, more 
than to any other one force. 

Imagine the United States of America peopled 
by Sioux, Apaches, Mexicans, and Negroes. Im- 
agine some Mughal conqueror arriving by the 
Behring Straits, and after centuries subduing this 
conglomeration of fighters, factions, religions, 
and languages. Pampered and rich, the conquer- 
ors lose control. The land is covered with small 
principalities. There is a king in Florida, an- 
other in Mexico, another in Massachusetts, and 
there are armed bands of Mexican bandits, of 



134 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Apache raiders, of Sioux freebooters. Imagine 
the country filled with jewels, brocades, silks, 
gold, silver, stored up for centuries by an indus- 
trious, uncommercial people, who had never 
learned to spend, and whose rich lived almost 
as simply as the poor. Something like that state 
of affairs is what the British had to deal with 
when Clive saw that merely to win a battle here 
and there was not enough, but that if the British 
were to stay in safety, they must have sovereign 
rights over the land itself. They now control the 
whole million and a half square miles. 



IV 

FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 

ON landing at Bombay one discovers that 
no experience of travel elsewhere has 
prepared the way. The luxuries are dif- 
ferent, the hardships are different, the whole set- 
ting of life is different. I am greeted on the 
landing-stage by a lean, chocolate-colored Indian, 
in flowing robes and a huge white turban, who 
presents a letter from a soldier friend in Luck- 
now, who has engaged him as servant or "bear- 
er" for our tour. He is solemnity personified, 
and his eyes are brown depths of unfathomable 
impenetrability. During the many weeks he was 
with us, I saw him smile but once. We were 
driving at Delhi, he was sitting on the box with 
the coachman. One of the ponies became frac- 
tious and landed one of his heels on the shin of 
the driver, who howled with pain. Heera Tall 
smiled, but even then there was no light, no keen- 
ness of joy or sorrow in his eyes. What he 
thought about this incident, or what he thought 
about anybody or anything else, I shall never 

135 



136 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

know, but I conclude that it was not of much 
importance. 

It is the easy habit both of those who have 
lived long in India, and of those who merely trot 
through India, to describe the people as inscru- 
table, and to assume that there are depths of 
thought and feeling behind the unknown tongue, 
and the unchanging eyes, which are too subtle 
for the Western mind. It occurs to the traveller 
sometimes that this is a mistake. There is a 
great difference between the indefinite and the in- 
definable. It is possible that India is not so much 
inscrutable as faded. This old, old civiliza- 
tion may have been printed so often from the 
same type that the lettering is now blurred and 
indecipherable. It may be illegible, too, be- 
cause the font of type conveys nothing very in- 
telligent or profound even to the users thereof. 

Because there was a great literature in India 
two thousand years B. C; a well-authenticated 
philosophy worked out into a considered system 
five hundred years B. C; a Sanskrit grammar 
compiled about 350 B. C, w^hich is still the 
foundation for all study of the Aryan language; 
an astronomy which had succeeded in making a 
fairly correct calculation of the solar year, 2000 
B. C; the discoveries of notation both bv frac- 
tions and algebra; a system of medicine, with 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 13T 

hospitals and dissecting-rooms; an art of music, 
with its seven notes, invented 500 B. C; a code 
of law, the Code of Manu, put into its present 
form about 400 A. D.; and a vast collection of 
legends and stories in verse, the Mahabharata, 
the main story dealing with a period not later than 
1200 B. C, because all this is the fruit of the 
soil of India, one is perhaps tempted to overrate 
what exists of intellectual prowess to-day. The 
inscrutability may be emptiness rather than depth. 

My singular opinion on this subject was not 
derived from a study of the bearer, Heera Tall, 
alone, for his patient inscrutability was, I am 
now convinced, merely a veil of depravity. He 
knew that what he knew and thought about was 
best left to the idealism of the cloudiest possible 
haziness. 

I was honored with the opportunity to know 
barristers, journalists, soldiers, native officials 
and judges, teachers, holy men, small landhold- 
ers, peasants, monks, princes, and educated wo- 
men, while in India, and I conclude that indefi- 
niteness, rather than profundity, describes their 
education and their philosophy of life. It is not 
only in India, and at this present time, that easy- 
going and rather flabby intellects have been will- 
ing to accept the high-flown, the turgid, and the 
indefinite as wonderful and weighty. 



138 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

The bluster of the demagogue appeals to the 
many, and the mental gyrations of the transcen- 
dental lecturer to fashionable women appeal to 
them, at any rate so long as they do not under- 
stand him. Ignotum pro magnifico, applies in 
the West as well as in the East. It is almost 
incredible, as an example of this, that Emerson 
should have said of Bronson Alcott and his silly 
*'all things are spiral," that Alcott's was the 
greatest philosophic mind since Plato. There 
are even fewer men who have minds of their 
own than have fortunes of their own. W^e are all 
directly descended intellectually from Animism, 
and the clouds and mists, the distortions and 
noises of the mind are accepted with awe by 
most of us, as mysteries too deep for us, when as 
a matter of fact what is not clear is generally the 
result of lazy thinking, rather than the exploit of 
an intellect dealing with matters too high for us. 

Of the religion and ideals of the overwhelm- 
ing majority of the people, I have written, and it 
seems to be a fatigued philosophy, and a blurred 
idealism, which animate even the leaders. The 
climate, and the habits which necessarily follow, 
tend to drowsiness, rather than to alertness and 
well-defined wants and wishes. 

Even the progressive men and women of In- 
dia are still steeped in the atmosphere of autoc- 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 139 

racy. They fumble badly with the new scheme 
of government, brought to them by their pres- 
ent rulers, the English. England's greatness is 
due in no small degree to the fact that she has 
held stubbornly to the belief, despite republics 
and revolutions, that all men are not equal, nor 
all entitled to an equal degree of liberty, but all 
entitled to an equal degree of justice. France 
substituted a sham equality for constitutional 
liberty, and the results are seen in that country 
to-day in the hateful and hampering tyrannies 
of bureaucracy. England goes so far as to de- 
clare by law that her people are not equal, but 
she administers justice to all alike, with an im- 
partiality and a rigidity unknow^n anywhere else 
in the w^orld. Equality is a sham, justice is a 
reality. Equality has never been realized, jus- 
tice has been done. One is purely theoretical, 
the other practical. England thus far has pre- 
ferred the possible reality to the impossible sham, 
with the result that her citizens have more per- 
sonal liberty, and are more unfettered in their 
activities, than the citizens of any other country. 
I found few, even among the educated in In- 
dia, who wanted justice. What they called jus- 
tice I found meant nearly always preference. 
The unrest and sedition in India are entangled 
in this mesh of misunderstanding, and their 



140 THE WEST IN THE EAST 



Western sympathizers are unwittingly making 
matters worse, by using words which mean one 
thing to them, and another thing to those to 
whom they are addressed. It should not be 
forgotten in studying them that their attitude 
toward the science of government is as old and 
as deeply bedded in their brains as their lit- 
erature, their astronomy, and their religion. 
Thousands of years of dampening of individual 
effort, of trusting to cunning, to bribery, to in- 
sidious influence, have distorted all notions of 
justice. They suffer from what Lord Curzon 
admirably phrases as the ''immemorial curse of 
Oriental nations, the trail of the serpent that is 
found everywhere from Stamboul to Peking — 
the vicious incubus of officialism, paramount, 
selfish, domineering, and corrupt. Distrust of 
private enterprise is rooted in the mind trained 
up to believe that the government is everything 
and the individual nothing." 

One's boyhood notions of Clive and Hastings, 
and of the *' John Company," are at once modi- 
fied. An hour on shore in Bombay is enough. 
Even the light is different. It is like that white 
light, so purely artificial, in w hich you are placed 
by the photographer when he asks you to as- 
sume a natural expression. The effect upon you 
at the photographer's, and upon everybody in 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 141 

India, is the same: in defending yourself from 
the light you assume a concealing expression. 
Thousands of years of this light have done more 
than we think, probably, to produce the inscruta- 
bility so much talked of, and which may after 
all be mainly physical. 

Another consequence of this hot white light 
is that one's clothes are piled on the head to pro- 
tect the brain. Most of the natives in the streets 
have more yards of stuff on their heads than on 
their bodies. Color runs riot. Pinks, blues, 
vermilion, orange, brown, yellow, red, saffron, 
and many shades of all of them, are worn by 
men and women ; even the bullock-carts, and the 
horns of the bullocks themselves, are daubed 
with glaring colors. Bare legs, breasts, and arms 
become so soon familiar that the most scrupu- 
lously pantalooned puritanism soon ceases to 
notice anything unusual. 

The short journey to the hotel reveals the 
teeming millions, for where else could nine men 
be spared to walk through the streets with a 
grand-piano balanced on their heads ; reveals the 
disdain of time, for where else is a trotting bul- 
lock a standard of speed, except in Madeira 
where the oxen draw sledges; reveals the una- 
shamed duplicity, for within an hour after our 
meeting Heera Tall has announced his wages per 



14^ THE WEST IN THE EAST 

month as just twice the amount that my friend 
in Lucknow has written me I ought to pay; re- 
veals the supremacy of the white race, for where 
else in this democratic world may the white man 
walk straight, unconscious and unmenacing, and 
yet find a lane made for him, as though he were 
a locomotive running on a pair of rails through 
a tow^n of prairie dogs ? 

An official of importance tells me that the first 
thing he does on his holiday visits to England is 
to walk dowTi the Strand, that he may recover 
from the place-giving, salaaming natives whom 
he governs, and be jostled and elbowed back into 
the equitable pedestrianism of the West. One 
might infer from this that the Englishman likes 
it, that the white traveller likes it. I can only 
say for myself, and for the scores of English of- 
ficials high and low that I met, and some of 
whom I knew well, that it is not a situation 
that the white man produces or wishes; rather 
is it wholly and entirely what the native has 
evolved as a penetrating and all-embracing legal 
atmosphere. This is his notion of justice, and 
order, and equality. He created it ages ago for 
his own defence, and he perpetuates it to-day for 
his own security. Palpable powder he must 
have, or there is anarchy. No one know^s better 
than the rich Parsi, or the intriguing Bengali, or 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 143 

the peasant proprietor, or the head-men, or the 
money-lenders and laborers, that the white man's 
unimpeded march straight through city or vil- 
lage streets is the symbol for them all, of their 
life, and fire, and property insurance. 

If this is modern Bombay, what must have 
been the Calcutta and the Madras of one hun- 
dred and fifty years ago, when Clive and Hast- 
ings laid the foundation-stones of British India ? 
What indeed was the England of those days, the 
England of George I, who could not read Eng- 
lish and *'who loved nothing but punch and fat 
women"; the England of George II, who "had 
been a bad son, a worse father, an unfaithful 
husband, and an ungraceful lover"; the Eng- 
land over whose political life was the soiling 
smear of Walpolean corruption; the England 
whose cabinet ministers fought for the control 
of the secret-service fund used for the bribery of 
the members of the House of Commons; the 
England which protested not a word that Fox, 
as paymaster of the forces, should have a hun- 
dred thousand pounds of the nation's money out 
at interest for his ow^n account, and who at one 
time made a mart of his office, and paid away as 
much as twenty-five thousand pounds in one 
morning, in the purchase of votes to buy sup- 
port for a timorous government? 



144 THE ^\^ST IN THE EAST 

When one stops to think of the political con- 
ditions of government in the country from which 
Clive and Hastings came, and of the conditions 
in the land to which they went, one is surprised 
at their guiltlessness. Clive fought like an Eng- 
lishman, but he bribed, deceived, and on one oc- 
casion actually forged a name to a treaty, like an 
Oriental. Both he and Hastings grew to look 
upon the getting and keeping of wealth, in a fash- 
ion that ruins men, whether in Calcutta in the 
eighteenth, or in New York in the twentieth cen- 
tury. Such rupees, and such dollars, can only 
buy the clothing of a convict, though their wear- 
ers and their descendants live in palaces. 

Clive, who was born in 1725, went out to In- 
dia as a clerk in the sei-vice of the East India 
Company at the age of eighteen. He was a 
whole year getting from London to Madras, one 
can go from London to Bombay now in fourteen 
days, and the territory of the company he was 
to serve consisted of a few square miles, and 
even for that, rent was paid to the native govern- 
ments. Here is a picture of an uncouth and 
morbid young man, destined to mope in an office 
chair. The French and the English go to war. 
A French governor of Mauritius captures Ma- 
dras. Clive joins the army, but peace is declared 
and he returns to his desk. Peace in Europe did 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 145 

not impose peace in India. A Frenchman of 
great ability, Dupleix, by name, saw the oppor- 
tunity to tie together the scattered fagots of power 
left in India after the death of Aurangzeb, the 
last of the Mughals, and began to do so. He 
played one Indian state against another, and 
backed by a small, but vastly superior force in 
point of efficiency, he put, and kept in power the 
native ruler or rulers he favored, and he soon 
became himself the supreme influence in south- 
ern India. Clive is now twenty-five. He urged 
his superiors to strike a blow to save India, and 
the English trading company, from complete 
French supremacy. He marched to Arcot, and 
took it without a blow. He was besieged there, 
he was offered large bribes to surrender, held out 
for fifty days, was attacked, defeated the enemy, 
and marched back to Madras as the first suc- 
cessful EngKsh soldier in India. There he found 
Major Stringer Lawrence just arrived from Eng- 
land, and his superior in command. The Law- 
rences could make a frieze of their names around 
India's temple of fame. This first Lawrence 
won Clive's friendship, and between them in tw^o 
years they broke the power of the French in India. 
The "fierce equality" of the Republic to be, of 
the French Revolution, could brook no superior 
men then, as now. Dupleix was stripped of his 



146 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

fortune and his fame, and died in obscurity; La- 
bourdonnais was sent to the Bastille, and Lally 
was dragged to his execution with a gag between 
his lips. No wonder the French are not col- 
onists ! 

Clive returned to England, still a boy, to be 
toasted as "General" Clive, and to receive a 
diamond-hilted sword from the company which 
he had saved. In 1755 he sailed for India with 
a commission of lieutenant-colonel, and the ap- 
pointment of governor of Fort St. David at 
Madras. 

The province of Bengal was governed by a 
native prince of eighteen, who, becoming jealous 
of the growing power of the English, found an 
excuse for attacking Calcutta. Most of the Eng- 
lish fled down the river, but one hundred and 
forty-six remained. Sura j ah Dowlah or Siraj- 
ud-daula — his name deserves to be remembered 
— ordered these prisoners to be confined in the 
jail at Fort William, a room eighteen feet square. 
It was June. I know the heat of Calcutta in 
March, what must it be in June.^ The na- 
tives prodded these English men, women, and 
children into the jail, and laughed at them and 
ridiculed them as they suffocated. In the morn- 
ing twenty-three were taken out alive. The one 
Englishwoman who survived was sent off to the 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 147 

harem of the young prince. This is the Black 
Hole of Calcutta story. 

Truly the English are a phlegmatic race. In 
the year 1910, in Calcutta again, they screen 
the motor-car of their viceroy, of the representa- 
tive of their king, with heavy wire netting, be- 
cause the descendants of the people of Surajah 
Dowlah throw stones at him. It seems a slow 
method of teaching self-government in India, and 
somewhat expensive in the lives of men and chil- 
dren, and the purity of women, but no doubt 
they know best. 

On hearing of this outrage, Clive and a squad- 
ron under Admiral Watson sailed for Calcutta. 
Calcutta was recovered with little fighting, and 
much to Clive's regret the Nawab Surajah Dow- 
lah consented to a peace, and made compensa- 
tion to the company for their money losses — 
the men, women, and children were not paid 
for! This might have been the end of the story, 
but again there was war between England and 
France. Clive took up the gauntlet in India. 
Surajah Dowlah sided with the French. Clive 
marched out to Plassey, about seventy miles 
north of Calcutta, with 1,000 Europeans, 2,000 
Sepoys, and 8 pieces of artillery. The Nawab's 
army numbered 35,000 foot and 15,000 horse. 
Clive attacked while the enemy were at dinner. 



148 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

and scattered the Nawab's army to the winds. 
This was June 23, 1757, just a hundred years 
before the Mutiny. 

Clive demanded over 2,000,000 pounds ster- 
ling as an indemnity, and was paid a little more 
than half that sum, of which Rs. 200,000 went 
to Clive as commander-in-chief, and Rs. 1,600,- 
000 as a private donation. A sum equal to about 
one million dollars of our money at that time. 
The rupee has since declined very much in value. 
At the same time the landholders' rights of the 
882 square miles around Calcutta w ere granted 
to the company. Later, the land tax was given 
to Clive personally, and he thus became the land- 
lord of the company he served. 

Following the fashion of the day, Clive 
schemed to put his own candidate, Mir Jafar, 
in the place of Surajah Dowlah. AMiile prepar- 
ing to oust him, he plotted against him and used, 
amongst others, a wdly Hindu named Omichund. 
The Hindu, knowing the secrets of the plot, 
threatened to inform Surajah Dowlah, unless he 
w ere promised a bribe of three hundred thou- 
sand pounds. He further demanded that this 
payment to himself should figure in the treaty. 
Clive prepared two treaties, one shown to the 
Hindu blackmailer with the promise of payment 
included, the other without it. Fearing that 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 149 

Admiral Watson would disapprove, he forged 
Watson's name to the treaty. When all was 
over, the Hindu was informed that he had been 
out-Orientalized by Clive, and later went mad. 

Mir Jafar began to fear the very power that 
upheld him, and secretly intrigued with a Dutch 
force which arrived from Java. Clive routed 
these. Their ships were destroyed, their troops 
scattered, and three months later Clive sailed for 
England. He was a great man now, and be it 
said he had great expectations of the honors to 
be awarded him at home. ^Vho has not been 
disappointed in such expectations.^ Clive was. 
He was a rich man now. He had sent home 
more than two hundred and fifty thousand 
pounds, and he had besides the spendid income 
from the land rents given him by the grateful 
Indian prince he had supported. Praise has a 
parasite, one steady and constant companion, 
malice. Clive was attacked in Parliament, and 
he was attacked even by the shareholders of the 
East India Company. 

Five years after leaving India for the second 
time, he was besought, even by those who had 
attacked him, to go back to save India again, to 
save her from the bribe-taking and personal ped- 
dling of the company's own servants. Stories 
of repeated revolutions, of a disorganized, pillag- 



150 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ing, and corrupt administration reached Lon- 
don. Clive alone could save the situation. 

He was made governor and commander-in- 
chief of the British possessions in Bengal, and 
as Baron Clive of Plassey in the peerage of Ire- 
land, he arrived in Calcutta in May, 1765, and 
remained a year and a half. He had now to 
fight the corruption, both military and civilian, 
of his own people. Even British officers threat- 
ened to resign if they were not allowed to steal. 
He forbade the receiving of gifts from natives, 
he prohibited private trade, he increased the sal- 
aries of the company's servants, he set the house 
of India in order, declined any rew^ard, and re- 
turned to England poorer than when he left it. 

These were the days of the nabob, and Clive 
was pointed to as the chief nabob of all. Eng- 
lishmen of little education, training, or taste, 
returned from India with swiftly made fortunes. 
They out-housed, out-carriaged, out-entertained, 
out-spent, and outraged the feelings of their 
home-keeping neighbors. Like many of the 
present-day American millionaires, they rode 
rough-shod mounted on Money. India in those 
days was far away from England. People did 
not go there for a winter's jaunt as now they 
go. Officers, military and civil, did not go and 
come, and send their wives and daughters home 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 151 

during the hot season. Men went to India, even 
the servants of the East India Company went, to 
exploit India not to serve her, to bring back a 
fortune as speedily as possible for themselves, 
not to protect the wealth, and to increase the 
wealth, and to conserve the resources of India 
for the people of India. 

They formed connections that were degrading, 
they made themselves as comfortable as a horde 
of cheap and obsequious servants could make 
them, and they became a race apart, bom of 
unlettered and irresponsible prosperity. When 
they returned to their native land they had other 
moral habits, tyrannous and irritable manners, 
ways of vulgar self-assertion, and the belief that 
mouthfuls of oaths and fistfuls of gold were the 
proper and most efficient weapons of civilization. 
They bound books that they did not read, they 
bought pictures they did not appreciate, they 
housed themselves as territorial magnates, who 
were but social pygmies, and substituted a gilded 
self -consciousness for family tradition. It is 
doubtful whether the manners and morals of the 
majority of their enemies, either then or now, 
offered security of standing, for the criticisms 
passed upon either the nabob of the eighteenth 
or the nabob of the twentieth century. There is 
a crowd of social as of political urchins always 



152 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

with leisure, and always ready to join in the pur- 
suit of the unfortunate and the unpopular. 

*' IVe rings on my fingers, 
I've bells on my toes, 
IVe elephants to ride upon 
My little Irish Rose. 

So come to your Nabob," 
&c. &c. 

was one of the jingles of the general ridicule of 
the time. When virtue, righteously indignant, 
sounded the horn for the chase, malice, envy, 
jealousy, and their cur-companions joined the 
pack, delighted to have the opportunity to yelp, 
and snarl, and snap, and bite if possible, in 
such distinguished company, and under auspices 
which made their jackal impudence look leonine. 
One may admire the Burke of those days, or of 
this, but the pack of muck-rakers which yelps 
the chorus is as contemptible now as then. One 
is tempted to defend the nabob merely because 
the majority of his accusers and assailants are 
actuated by such mean motives. 

I sometimes shock my dilettante and prema- 
turely effete American friends, by expressing my 
hearty enjoyment of the horde of Occidental na- 
bobs from my own country, who nowadays pour 
through Europe. Their naif test of what is pre- 
cious by its price ; their sentimental longing and 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 153 

reverence for what is old ; the clothing of their 
women, imitated from the only models they are 
privileged to see at close quarters, the cocoUes of 
Paris; their reiterated nasal narration of the his- 
tory of their dollars, and their glowing enumera- 
tion of those to come; their swiftly acquired and 
confidential comradeship with hotel clerks, cou- 
riers, and shop-keepers; their confident views, 
boldly expressed, upon subjects with the element- 
ary aspects of which they are totally unfamiliar; 
their chief occupations, which seem to be spend- 
ing money, advertising their wives and daughters 
in the newspapers, and explaining their ances- 
try, in all these symptoms I rejoice. Such peo- 
ple are the signal and sonorous heralds of the 
power of mere money, and at the same time 
ominous examples of the graces it destroys; they 
are hard-featured and soft-handed; they are 
cultivated by those who would prey upon them, 
and shunned almost with loathing by the aris- 
tocracy of simplicity, sincerity, and responsi- 
bility; they are the modem barbarians of the 
Rome of modern civilization; they are of those 
who must define the word "gentleman" them- 
selves in order to be included in the definition, 
and no body of men spend so much time at the 
task; and even now against their brutal and con- 
scienceless methods the state is arming itself . 



154 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Every one knows the names of these leaders 
of the Goths and Vandals of our time, and no 
libraries, parks, colleges, hospitals, and cringing 
clerical receivers of such bribes can cloak them 
in the shining garments of charity; we all, alas, 
are surrounded, too, by their imitators, who, 
though lacking in their prowess, lack nothing of 
their lust for plunder. The sad feature of the 
situation is that dignity in manners, simplicity 
in morals, responsibility of wealth, fearlessness in 
administration, will all suffer, before a new Rome 
emerges from the clutches of this blundering, 
plundering, and reckless band. 

Why do I, an American, rejoice at this spec- 
tacle, it may be asked. The answer is simple. 
The higher their banners hang on the walls of the 
social or shopping citadels of London, Paris, and 
New York, the more brazen their manners, the 
more high-handed their methods, the sw^ifter and 
surer will come their downfall. I laugh to think 
that the man of greasy complexion, of glittering 
eye, of over-full belly and protruding pocket, can 
believe that because London dines with him in 
order to escape with some of his wealth tied up in 
his daughter's trousseau, because Paris panders 
to him, that therefore he is meant to strangle 
the Puritan of the East, and the Cavalier of the 
South, and the honest emigrant on the land 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 155 

between them, of my country. His trial is not 
far off, and his Burke and his Sheridan are pre- 
paring their suit against him, and the Western 
nabob will disappear as did his Eastern proto- 
type. He has been permitted to grow, from the 
days of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk rascality, and 
to escape thus far, through no intrepid or in- 
genious defence of his own, but because those 
who oppose and despise him shrink from seeming 
to ally themselves with any form of socialism in 
attacking him. I, for one, would rather suffer 
the nabob, than to see the worthy ambitions, 
energy, initiative, and the commercial aggres- 
siveness and ability of my country taxed into cow- 
ardice, and be-lawed into helplessness, by the 
leaders of a mob of all the shiftlessness, envy, 
crankiness, and inability in the land. I would 
rather a few freebooters escaped, than that the 
state should be bullied by a bureaucracy created 
and supported by the state itself. Every man 
who mulcts the treasury of a railroad, who uses 
false weights for his sugar, or who rigs the stock 
market, shouts "Socialism" when it is attempted 
to punish him. Just the contrary is true. The 
men who do most to bring the menace of social- 
ism are these very financial freebooters, bar- 
barians, and nabobs of the West, whose salient 
characteristics I have attempted to describe. It 



156 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

is nonsense to proclaim that we cannot have jus- 
tice without socialism and fair-dealing without 
bureaucracy. One might as logically assert that 
to hang a murderer, or to imprison a thief, means 
a return to feudalism, or the founding of an au- 
tocracy. 

Wealth and power in the ordinary scheme of 
things should be hard to get, but equal justice 
should keep them within reach of every honest 
citizen whose labors and abilities deserve them. 
Inferior people always think that the work of 
the writer, the painter, the soldier, the adminis- 
trator, once it is done must be easy for them, 
since they only accomplish what is easy them- 
selves. They account for it by luck or by op- 
portunity, never remembering that their own 
abilities never seem to find this right oppor- 
tunity. That is what luck is. It is the hard 
work done by ability and opportunity w^hen they 
meet. There is only one success which is easy, 
but also precarious, and that is intemperate ora- 
tory fondling the mob with deceitful words. 

Clive stood out as the chief of the nabobs, he 
became the best-hated man in England. A com- 
mittee of Parliament censured, but did not con- 
demn him. He died by his own hand in 1774. 

Clive went to India when India was fifteen 
thousand miles away. He changed the East 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 157 

India Company from a band of plundering ped- 
lers, into the beginnings of a beneficent govern- 
ment. He won for England the greatest de- 
pendency she has ever had, or ever will have. 
He realized to the Indian a white governor as 
powerful and more just than any ruler in their 
history. The shadow of his greatness still lends 
security to every white man, woman, and child, 
and likewise to every brown man, woman, and 
child, in India. 

He forged a friend's name, he lied to an ae- 
compUce, he accepted wealth from those he con- 
quered, he died by his own hand. 

He is very dull, or very daring, who assumes 
the right to hold the scales of justice for God, 
in pronouncing a final verdict upon this man. 
Few of us are so greatly good, or so contempti- 
bly bad, as this man. Few of us accomplish 
much, or leave a reputation worth puzzling 
over. 

Warren Hastings succeeded Clive as governor- 
general in 1772, and for thirteen years, consoli- 
dated a British administration in India, for the 
vast territories which Clive had done so much to 
win. He became the organizer, as Clive had 
been the founder, of the British Indian Empire. 
One is tempted to write on of Hastings, as the 
temptation to write of Clive was irresistible. 



158 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

There was still rough work to do and Hastings 
used rough weapons. 

Authority means responsibility, responsibility 
demands control, and control easily converts itself 
into possession. Such was the logical progres- 
sion of the English in India. They demanded 
peace and fair play for themselves, and then for 
those whom they protected. The sphere of in- 
fluence of this trading company easily widened 
to dominion. Protection for themselves or their 
allies often meant war, and war to insure its effi- 
cacy meant control, and control, disputed, was 
followed by possession. 

This cycle of progress has reached such a pitch 
that to-day the British crown has stretched its 
sphere of influence not only throughout India, 
but far beyond the boundaries of India. From 
Singapore in the south to Afghanistan in the 
north, and from Thibet in the east to Persia and 
Egypt in the west, is included in the vast cloak 
of territory now deemed necessary to the pro- 
tection from rough political weather of that lit- 
tle colony of rented acres to which Clive sailed in 
1743. Take a map and look at it. The Ind- 
ian Empire, or its allies and feudatories, now 
occupies the whole area of southern Asia be- 
tween Russia and China. On the north and 
west she controls, as against a possible offensive 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 159 

move from Russia, Beluchistan, Afghanistan, 
Kashmir, and the petty states beyond Kashmir 
up to the skirts of the Hindu Kush Mountains. 
To the east and south are Nepal and Burma, and 
beyond Burma a line of semi-independent chief- 
tainships, which serve as buffers between India 
and China. The outer frontier of British India 
has an immense circumference. The south- 
eastern extremity on the Gulf of Siam extends 
thence to Tibet on the north, thence north and 
westward to the Oxus. On the north-west it 
covers Afghanistan and Beluchistan, and finally 
has its western and southern extremity on the 
shores of the Arabian Sea. This is what the 
British Empire has undertaken to defend against 
Japan, China, Russia, Persia, and Turkey, 
and with Germany on her flank in the North 
Sea. There can be no weakening, no social- 
reform flabbiness, if these colossal territorial re- 
sponsibilities are to be properly safeguarded. 
There is also a discontented, some say seditious, 
many say disloyal, population in India to keep 
under. In Lucknow and other towns the statue 
of the empress-queen is guarded day and night 
by a sentinel, to protect it from coarse infamy 
and injury. 

The history of the settling of the boundary 
stones is a long and complicated one, reaching 



160 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

down to that gallant soldier and patriot, and dis- 
tinguished historian, Lord Roberts, who is alive 
to-day. 

The history of the settlement of the moral 
territory was concluded once and for all when, 
after Clive's impeachment, his successor, War- 
ren Hastings, was also impeached, in a trial last- 
ing seven years, a trial conducted for the British 
crown, and for the Christian world, by Burke. 
The pith of the matter at issue was, whether the 
control of alien races by Christian rulers per- 
mitted the use of alien methods and morals; 
whether, in short, the Western ruler should be 
permitted to have an easy code of geographical 
ethics, one for London, and one for Calcutta; 
one for Amsterdam, and one for Java; one for 
Washington, and one for Cuba ; one for Brussels, 
and one for the Congo. Theoretically the ques- 
tion was settled for all time at the trial of War- 
ren Hastings in the historic hall at Westminster; 
practically it is still to be enforced, but only here 
and there, and by conquerors other than the 
Anglo-Saxons. St. Augustine writes: "To ex- 
tend rulership over subdued natives is to bad 
men a felicity, but to good men a necessity." 

The East preys upon the weak, the West pro- 
tects the weak. The social economy of the East 
is based upon the law of the jungle, we of the 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 161 

West make the attempt, at least, to base our 
own upon the dicta of Christ. Therein lies the 
difference which separates us completely. It is 
the difference between the wolf and the sheep- 
dog. I do not maintain that the shepherd's dog 
is always, everywhere, perfectly correct in his 
behavior, but his ideal and his general standard 
of conduct are protection and guidance for the 
sheep, and affection and loyalty for his master. 
While the ideal and the general standard of the 
wolf are to kill both shepherd and sheep, if it 
can be done with safety to himself. 

Even after the new code of the rulers was firmly 
established morally, it had to fix itself physically. 
The natives of India could not be taught in a 
hundred years to believe what for two thousand 
years and more they had been beaten and plun- 
dered into not believing. The Mutiny in 1857 
was the result of their scepticism. The motto 
of that trading company in 1757 might well have 
been : Omnes diligunt munera, but the most bit- 
ter enemy of Great Britain must confess that her 
civil service both in India and elsewhere is now a 
standard for the world. Candor non laeditur auro. 
The civil government of two hundred and 
thirty-two millions and the partial control of 
sixty-six millions in India are now in the hands 
of about one thousand two hundred Englishmen, 



162 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

including military oflScers in civil employ and 
others, and I doubt if there is one brown man's 
rupee in any white man's pocket that should not 
be there. But a man may be honest, contemp- 
tuously; just, arrogantly; and confident, care- 
lessly, that those beneath him will accept his 
actions without his sympathy, and judge him by 
his morals rather than by his manners. But 
that is not the brown man's way. The prohibi- 
tion of sati, or widow-burning; the execution of 
the high-caste Brahman like any low-caste man, 
if he was found guilty; the missionary assertive- 
ness on behalf of themselves and their converts; 
the indifference to the laws of caste; the doing 
away with any legal obstacle to the remarriage 
of widows ; tales that in the jails all were fed alike 
without reference to caste; the fear of the Brah- 
mans that they would lose their position and in- 
fluence; the readjustment of land revenues and 
taxes; the settlement of claims and boundaries; 
the lapse of territory to the British power in de- 
fault of direct or collateral heirs; the story of 
the Enfield cartridges greased with a mixture of 
cow's fat and lard — true as shown by the in- 
vestigations of Mr. Forrest — Lecky writes that 
the Sepoys in the Mutiny had "sound reason" 
for fearing injury to their religion as Hindus and 
Mussulmans: "This is a shameful and terrible 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 163 

fact, and if mutiny were justifiable, no stronger 
justification could be given than that of the Se- 
poy troops"; the sickening sentimentality of the 
ignorant English at home, who feted and petted 
a certain Azimula Kham, the emissary of Nana 
Sahib himself, a man of no position in his own 
country, but who was received into the best so- 
ciety in London, and who exchanged love-letters 
with ladies of rank and position, even became 
engaged to an English girl, and was called "her 
dear Eastern son" by an idiotic old dowager; 
flogging abolished in the native army, but con- 
tinued among the British, the natives looking on 
at the flogging of white men; the annexation of 
new territories until the Rajput, the Mahratta, 
the Sikh, and the Muhammadan laid aside their 
common jealousies and recognized England as 
equally the foe of all ; no rapid intercommunica- 
tion as now; a British force in India of thirty-six 
thousand men as over against a native force of 
two hundred and fifty-seven thousand, besides 
the armed police, and lascars attached to the 
artillery as fighting men — it would have been 
a miracle if there had been no mutiny. 

Along different lines much the same thing 
goes on in England to-day, and again it w^ill be 
a miracle if there is no trouble with Germany, 
or in India, within ten years. One can depend 



164 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

upon the British, however, to wait for that event 
until they are fully unprepared. 

If an imaginative observer were asked to coin 
a phrase least adapted to the present situation 
and condition of the British Empire, he might 
use the words: "Englishmen may sleep peace- 
fully in their beds!" It is comical to record that 
the young solicitor who answers to the country 
for the navy uses this phrase; the able metaphy- 
sician who responds for the army uses this phrase ; 
the lately anarchical labor leader, who replies for 
the commerce of the country, uses this phrase; 
the solicitor who is responsible for the finances 
of the country uses this phrase; the Prime Min- 
ister, a scholarly barrister, and be it said the 
steady-headed, strong-handed master of them 
all, despite the tales to the contrary, repeats the 
same phrase. I repeat, for an almost wearisome 
number of times, they are a great people ! Fancy 
singing *'Rock-a-by, baby, on the tree-top" to 
the House of Commons and to the country, with 
such responsibilities, such perils, such warnings 
pressing upon their attention. We may all envy 
them their sound nerves. If this cabinet were 
a drinking cabinet, I should ask, as did Lincoln 
of the accusers of Grant, for the brand they most 
affect. I should indulge myself, and distribute 
what could be spared in W^all Street. 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 165 

The British were warned over and over again 
before 1857. Read that rare but valuable book, 
"Essays Military and Political," by Sir Henry 
Montgomery Lawrence, and see the blundering 
methods, described by one of their own most du- 
tiful servant sons, which brought on the Mutiny. 

The native, instead of understanding, mis- 
understood. He did not see that these changes 
were meant for his good. He believed that the 
Brahman was a law unto himself, that widows 
should be burned, and certainly not be allowed 
to remarry, and thus stiffen the competition, al- 
ready severe, against his own daughters. The 
annexation and control of territory was robbery 
to him; he did not see that it meant peace, se- 
curity, and justice. That the Hindus' cartridges 
were to be greased with the fat of the sacred cow, 
and the Muhammadans' cartridges greased with 
the fat of the abhorred pig, was to them what 
coarse jests at the miracle of the Mass would be 
to Catholics. It was blasphemous, terrible, and 
ominous of mysterious and awful spiritual pun- 
ishment. 

We rejoice at the daring of Luther and Sir 
Thomas More, and the blood and jSre of our 
own religious revolution, why then be aston- 
ished that there was revolution in India before 
the protestant there won freedom of opinion and 



166 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

worship ? The jaunty confidence, or the prayer- 
ful faith, in right doing of the white man, was 
not accepted as the voice of any god known to 
them by the Indians. The Indian brain seethed 
with mutinous misunderstanding, and why not! 
The English were so obtuse that they saw not, 
neither did they hear, much less did they take 
any precautions. Many of the most energetic 
and valuable officers had been drafted off from 
their regiments, both to serve in the Crimea, and 
to meet the heavy demands of the many newly 
acquired territories for governors and advisers. 
I quote the words of one of the heroes, and the 
historian of that time, the words of the man who 
has retrieved more than one of England's maud- 
lin blunders, the man who is to-day emphasizing 
with his now unequalled experience of the past, 
the dangers of the present and the future. Lord 
Roberts. "Seniority had produced brigadiers 
of seventy, colonels of sixty, captains of fifty. 
Nearly every military officer who held a com- 
mand or high position on the staff in Bengal when 
the Mutiny broke out disappeared within the 
first few weeks. Some were killed, some died of 
disease, but the great majority failed completely 
to fulfil the duties of the positions they held. 
Two generals of division were removed, seven 
brigadiers were found wanting, and out of the 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 167 

seventy-three regiments of regular cavalry and 
infantry which mutinied only four commanding 
oflBcers were given other commands, younger 
officers being selected to raise and command the 
new. regiments." 

These were the gentlemen who, in pajamas, 
with a w^hiskey-peg and a cigar, seated on the 
roof of a bungalow, drilled the natives of India, 
believing that the gods, and literature, and re- 
ligion, and customs of three hundred million 
people for two or three thousand years would 
melt into acquiesence at the wave of the whiskey 
or cigar-laden hand from on high. 

They were dealing with a generation which had 
forgotten the anarchy and bloodshed, the pillag- 
ing and oppression, which preceded British rule. 
Muhammadans looked back to the time when 
they were emperors of India, and when British 
ambassadors stood meekly on the lower steps of 
their emperor's throne. The Hindus only re- 
membered that they were on the point of wrest- 
ing the control from the Muhammadans when 
the white man stepped in. The interim of order, 
security, and justice was forgotten. Instead of to 
a magnificently clad figure seated on a bejewelled 
throne, with a peacock's tail of precious stones 
w^orth millions as a background for his turban, 
and this in the setting of a marble hall which 



168 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

still remains as a monument of beauty, instead 
of to this he salaamed to an amorphous and rubi- 
cund figure on the roof of a cheaply built bunga- 
low, whose sceptre was a cigar, and whose spir- 
itual life was contained in a glass. The one was 
thinking of curry and comfort; the other of tra- 
ditions, and faith, and lost prestige; and the 
gentlemen of curry and comfort were actually 
dumfounded when the underfed underlings be- 
trayed them, killed their women and children, 
and marched from Meerut to Delhi, before they 
could get the whiskey-fed rheum out of their 
eyes. Indeed they let a whole night and day go 
by, did these men, whose ancestors had driven 
Clive to suicide, before they made a move. How 
different if Clive had been there! 

The Mutiny opened May the 10th, 1857, and 
it was January, 1859, before the English gained 
complete control again. And at what a price 
of heroism and suffering ! But, not the Mutiny 
nor any other disturbance, political or otherwise, 
in India, affects more than a minute proportion 
of India. Throughout the Mutiny the peasants 
tended their fields ; the rice, the wheat, the sugar, 
the cotton were sown and reaped as usual. Mill- 
ions in India did not even hear of the Mutiny. 
This is a characteristic of India to be empha- 
sized and to be remembered. No other country 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 169 

is so mute, so unconscious, so deaf in the midst 
of turmoil and bloodshed. The American must 
school his imagination to this situation. A fire 
in Chicago, a flood in Texas, an earthquake in 
California is a fire, a flood, an earthquake for 
the whole country. Not so in India. There were 
people peacefully at work within fifty miles of the 
fighting who knew nothing of it; and even now, 
flood, plague, or famine slays hundreds of thou- 
sands in one part of India, and the rest of India 
is ignorant and undisturbed. When one hears 
of unrest in India, or when one hears that India 
w^ants this, or needs that, all such statements 
must be put into this enormous crucible where 
they are ground exceeding small, and prove to 
be after all only the unrest, the need, or the want 
of a minute fraction of the unwieldy whole. It 
is like one of the huge zoological reconstructions 
of another age, whose hide is so thick, whose ex- 
tremities are so far apart, that unlike any other 
bodies known to us, what touches or hurts or 
heals one part has no effect upon the others. 

At Cawnpur was a large native garrison, and 
when they mutinied Nana Sahib put himself at 
their head. The Europeans, including more 
women and children than fighting men, were be- 
sieged for two weeks, and then trusting to a safe- 
conduct from Nana Sahib, they surrendered. 



170 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

They embarked in boats on the Ganges, the 
boats were set fire to and shot at by the natives 
from both banks, and only four escaped. The 
women and children were massacred a few days 
later, some of them being pitchforked living 
upon the bayonets of their murderers. 

Delhi was besieged for months from the sur- 
rounding ridge, over which I have walked and 
driven, but it was only in September that the 
Kashmir Gate was blown in, and Nicholson fell 
at the head of the storming party. 

The chief commissioner of Oudh was a Law- 
rence, and not a Lawrence for nothing. He pre- 
pared for a siege in the Residency at Lucknow, 
and was mortally wounded there, but his intelli- 
gent prevision saved his companions till at last 
Lucknow was relieved. 

It is one of the ghastly nightmares of history 
to see that Black Hole of Calcutta, that well at 
Cawnpur, that cellar in the residency at Luck- 
now% that grave-dotted ridge at Delhi. Women 
and children outraged, suffocated, pitchforked 
on bayonets, burnt, stabbed, starved, and stran- 
gled : it is a horrible tale. Say what one will of 
all that, it is British business, British vengeance, 
not ours, but it is a disgrace to the whole white 
race that British callousness, and lack of taste 
and reverence, should permit these graves to be 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 171 

overgrown with weeds, should suffer that miser- 
able little graveyard on the ridge above Delhi, 
should allow the lettering on the Kashmir Gate 
to become defaced. The only monument in all 
India that is not a travesty is the statue of John 
Nicholson, and more than one of the statues of 
the white empress and the white emperor of 
India are hlach! With all their splendid quali- 
ties and achievements, to which I have tried 
without prejudice to do justice, their stupid- 
ity is at times as criminal as their attempts at 
artistic commemoration are grotesque. If taste 
is not indigenous, we can and do supply them 
with a West, a Whistler, a Sargent, a La Farge, 
a St. Gaudens. Let them knight their painters 
of marble baths, and Greek maidens, and bridge 
problems, and over-decorated wooden sover- 
eigns, and sentimental scenes of bourgeois do- 
mesticity, but let them turn over their monu- 
ments, in which we are all interested, to the real 
craftsmen of the arts. 

The East India Company, its first charter 
signed and sealed in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth, 
came to an end in 1858 after the Mutiny. The 
administration of India was handed over to the 
crown. Queen Victoria, later, on January 1 , 1 877, 
to be proclaimed empress of India, issued the fol- 
lowing proclamation when India was taken over: 



172 THE ^^1EST IN THE EAST 

"We hold ourselves bound to the natives of 
our Indian territories by the same obligations of 
duty which bind us to all our subjects ; and these 
obligations, by the blessings of Almighty God, 
we shall faithfully and conscientiously fulfil. 
And it is our further will, that so far as may be, 
our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be fully 
and impartially admitted to offices in our ser- 
vice, the duties of which they may be qualified, 
by their education, ability, and integrity, duly 
to discharge." 

I quote these words for my readers because 
they were quoted many times to me by the dis- 
contented natives of India. The British went 
further with words of promise than they find it 
easy to go in actual practice. Intentions have 
lungs, breathe, and are communicative. The 
English are forever intending things for India, 
which when they are done are already ungrate- 
fully received as things long ago deserved; and 
when they are not done, and compromise is sub- 
stituted, the Indian sees nothing but hypocrisy 
and broken promises. 

A distinguished Indian gentleman, writing of 
the reforms just introduced by Lord Minto, says: 
**Why is there so little enthusiasm among the 
educated classes about them ? Why are some 
even beginning to fear that they may fail to heal 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 173 

the existing distemper? Because a certain fa- 
tality seems to clog the steps of the government, 
that whenever it does anything useful for the 
people it knows not how to do it with good grace,'' 
The italics are mine, for there in a nutshell is the 
ever-present criticism of British rule. It is just, 
honest, but unsympathetic and ungracious. It 
is a delicate and a difficult problem. One must 
tread softly both physically and metaphorically. 
We ourselves have not won such laurels by our 
dealings with the ten million negroes in America 
that we can afford to be censorious, or to offer 
easy, ready-made solutions for the problem. In- 
effable cocksureness might be tempted to shout: 
Get on or get out! were it not for the possibility 
of a despatch the next morning announcing a 
lynching-bee in one's own country, to emphasize 
one's fallibility. 

If you and I had taken over the government 
of a distracted country, which for centuries had 
dated passing events from the last raid, the last 
massacre, the last famine, the last deluge, the 
last plundering ride of a foreign invader; and if 
we had laid there 30,000 miles of railway, 100,000 
miles and more of telegraph wire ; if we had wa- 
tered 17,000,000 acres with canals of our own 
construction; if we had arranged that one in 
every seven acres of the whole country were ir- 



174 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

rigated; if we had built schools, nursing homes, 
dispensaries, hospitals, where 8,000,000 chil- 
dren are vaccinated and 25,000,000 people re- 
ceive relief annually, and post-offices and police- 
stations ; if school attendance had increased from 
500,000 to 6,000,000; if the letters carried had 
increased from none to 700,000,000 annually; 
if we had policed the country from end to end, 
administered justice without fear or favor; spent 
millions of money and thousands of lives in the 
country's defence; protected the people from 
brutal customs, protected the widow and the 
orphan ; secured to every man, woman, and child 
his rights, his property, and his earnings; if out 
of nearly 29,000 ofiBces of the government draw- 
ing salaries ranging from £60 — no small in- 
come for a native of India — up to <£5,000, as 
many as 22,000 were filled by natives, and only 
6,500 by Europeans; if out of a gross revenue 
of .£75,272,000 only £20,816,000 was raised by 
taxes so-called, while in England taxation sup- 
plies five-sixths, and in India only about one- 
fourth, of the public income; if we had reduced 
crime to proportions smaller than in England 
itself; if the public debt, outside of debt secured 
by the ample asset of the railways, canals, and 
so on, amounted to only £28,000,000, a sum less 
than half of what it cost to suppress the Mutiny 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 175 

alone ; if the land, which when we took charge had 
hardly any commercial value, was now worth 
^300,000,000; if the export and import trade in 
less than fifty years had increased from <£40,- 
000,000 to c£200,000,000, while taxation works 
out at about 37 cents per head; if innocent re- 
ligious and social customs had not only not been 
changed, but protected from interference, in 
these days too, alas, when so many people mis- 
take interference for influence, and in a land of 
jarring and quarrelsome sects — if you and I 
had a fraction of these things accomplished by 
the English in India to our credit, we should be 
astonished at censure from without, or criticism 
from within. We might indeed be tempted to 
resent them. 

The Indian agitators tell the people that the 
railways carry the grain away from the starving, 
and pay large dividends to the builders ; that the 
canals carry pestilence and disease; that the 
taxes go to the support of an army to fight Eng- 
land's battles, and to the support of oflScials who 
bully the native; that the schools, and hospitals, 
and colleges are hot-beds of heresy, where the 
young Indian is taught to deny his ancestral be- 
liefs, that the foreign ruler may surreptitiously 
introduce his own creed and ritual. These are 
the grosser forms of seditious talks and Iitera- 



176 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ture intended to impress the agricultural class. 
The more intelligent are fed with more subtle 
accusations. 

One accusation against the English carries 
weight. There are people still living who can 
remember when India had its weavers and dyers 
by the hundreds of thousands, and when weav- 
ing was a profitable industry. In the early 
years of the last century, it was stated in evi- 
dence, that the cotton and silk goods of India 
could be sold in England at a profit of from fifty 
to sixty per cent, and there and then the English 
weaver was protected by duties upon this class 
of Indian goods of from seventy to eighty per 
cent on their value. The poor Indian weaver, 
earning his six or eight cents a day, was ruined 
for the benefit of the English manufacturer. 
At this present time Lancashire goods are 
charged a duty of 5 per cent, on entering India, 
and the Indian mills pay an excise duty of 5 
per cent, on their output of these same goods. 
There are 150 cotton mills in the Bombay Presi- 
dency, and in normal times they make large 
profits. The old East India Company treated 
the Indian weaver without regard to anything 
other than the prospect of gain to the company ; 
and even to-day it may be doubted whether 
India would not profit by a certain amount of 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 177 

protection. Free trade as between India and 
England in the matter of manufactures can 
hardly be called fair trade. 

On the other hand, the accusation of lack of 
sympathy, of comradeship, of social intercourse, 
is twaddle. The Indian climate, and population, 
and steady adherence to religious and social cus- 
toms have swallowed up every religion and every 
civilization which has mixed with it, from Buddh- 
ism in religion to the Mughal dynasty. The 
British maintain control, and can only retain 
control, by refusing any intimacy of intercourse 
which would entail the mixing of one civiliza- 
tion with the other. They have their own clubs, 
their own sports, their sheltered homes, and their 
own codes. They go out to India in relays, and 
not to settle, and that is their salvation. They 
go out alone or with their families, not to mingle 
and to mix, but to work at governing, and to 
come home when their task is done as much 
Englishmen as when they went out. If they 
went to India with their families to be swallowed 
up, to be incorporated socially, morally, and po- 
litically, then indeed there would be no excuse for 
their rule there. Any other policy would be fatal. 
No race except the English could maintain 
their gravity at the thought that purdah parties 
are a political necessity. Most of the Indian 



178 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

women live secluded, and always in public cover 
their faces, which is termed being in purdah. 
The women of the families of the English offi- 
cials have been urged to show their interest by 
inviting these ladies to their houses. They play 
children's games w^ith them, eat cakes .and drink 
tea with them, and stroking the dome of St. 
Paul's Cathedral to influence the dean and chap- 
ter is no more futile than is this silly soliciting 
of comradeship with the women of India, as a 
method of propitiating the irreconcilables. 

Mr. Saint Nihal Singh writes: ''Statistics show 
the number of female children married under 
four years of age to be more than 200,000, of 
those married between five and nine to be over 
2,000,000, and those married under fourteen to 
be 8,000,000; and the enforced widowhood of 
these girls is the greatest curse of India. But 
while educated native men are working for the 
emancipation of the women, unfortunately, as 
already observed, they are persistently hindered 
in their efforts by the opposition offered to their 
programme of progress by their unlettered, re- 
actionary womenfolk; their wives, mothers, sis- 
ters, and daughters, even their widowed female 
relatives, are bitterly opposed to this radical re- 
form, and their combined power perpetuates the 
practice. 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 179 

The last census showed that 997 Muhamma- 
dan and 995 Hindu women per 1,000 were illit- 
erate in the year of our Lord 1900. What is 
still worse is the fact that at present less than one 
per cent of Indian girls of school-going age are 
being educated." 

None but a great nation impervious to ridi- 
cule could persist in urging officially its civil 
servants to ask their wives to entertain the native 
women with childish games, as a mark of a sym- 
pathetic administration. The French or the 
Americans would suffocate with laughter at the 
suggestion. This is not sympathy, this is cur- 
dled kindliness. Just as one ceases to be well 
dressed when one is noticeably well dressed, so 
friendliness ceases to be friendliness when it puts 
on a uniform and advertises itself. But what 
can you expect from a nation whose minister 
for war sends out a solemn circular suggesting 
that the new territorial force should assemble 
on a convenient Sunday to thank God that they 
had been evolved from his brain, and that their 
predecessors had ceased to exist; or the even more 
grotesque circular, which must certainly have 
been suggested to Mr. Haldane by a wag in the 
war office, but which was nonetheless sent out, 
to the effect that landlords who are heads of 
territorial contingents in their neighborhood 



180 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

should be granted permission to add an un- 
sheathed sword pointing upward to their flag, or 
pointing downward when they were no longer 
in oJBBce ? Only a ponderous patriot could thus 
offer himself for the altar of the Abraham of ridi- 
cule, on the off chance that a convenient ram 
would be found in the near-by bushes. 

But along the lines of humor and sestheticism 
a nation that will tamely submit to the Albert 
Memorial monument or to the statue of Shelley 
at Oxford, may be expected to furnish ample 
matter for amusement. Heine wrote to a rich 
uncle that there were so many fools in the world 
that he felt no fear of not being able to make a 
living. He even added, that he thought he could 
live on that one uncle alone. The Albert Me- 
morial alone would furnish a literary living for 
a life-time. 

The male Indian, both Hindu and Muham- 
madan, of course with exceptions among the ed- 
ucated, still looks upon women much as Eras- 
mus did: "Woman is an absurd and ridiculous 
animal, but entertaining and pleasant." 

When the Englishman becomes self-conscious, 
either socially or morally, he is deplorably awk- 
ward. There is so much talk, so much audible 
discontent, so much putting of the old methods 
of government into the crucible, just now in 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 181 

India, that the Englishmen is beginning to won- 
der if he is right, if he is justified, and this makes 
for self-consciousness and for lack of confidence, 
and reacts upon the people. A nervous rider 
makes a nervous horse. The Indian does not 
understand that this is the vacillation of con- 
science; he interprets it in the one way his ex- 
perience permits him to interpret it, as fear. 
Artificial sympathy, pumped-up cordiality, as- 
sumed comradeship, are no more possible to the 
average Englishman than trimming hats, curling 
hair, or dancing skirt-dances. 

There is an ample supply of honest comrade- 
ship and real sympathy between the British and 
the Indian. I have spent weeks camping and 
travelling with soldier and civil service officials. 
Any man who believes that there is lack of sym- 
pathy should spend some time with British offi- 
cers and their native troops ; with British officers 
and the Imperial Service troops of the native 
princes ; with commissioners and deputy com- 
missioners doing their work in the outlying dis- 
tricts; or hear for the first time the Englishman 
"talking shop" as the British officer in India will 
do in his enthusiasm about his Gurkhas, or his 
Sikhs, or his Patiala Lancers, or his Bhopal light 
cavalry. It would be affectation on my part to 
say that my experience is limited in these matters. 



182 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

for I have ridden with our Western troopers many 
a mile on the plains, and only lately I have seen 
Japanese cavalry schools, Chinese mountain bat- 
teries, Argentine cavalry, English soldiering at 
home, and nowhere in the world, I maintain, w^ill 
you find better feeling between officers and men 
than in India. This is the sympathy that one 
need not be ashamed of, and which counts ; w hile 
the tea-cake variety is merely the doctrinaire 
philanthropy of parochial officialdom. 

When one reads a leaflet recently distributed 
in Bengal signed '* Editor," and with the follow- 
ing postscript: "The editor will be extremely 
obliged to readers if they will translate into all 
languages and circulate broadcast," and which 
runs as follows: "Sacrifice white blood undiluted 
and pure at the call of your god on the altar of 
freedom. The bones of the martyrs cry out for 
vengeance, and you will be traitors to your coun- 
try if you do not adequately respond to the call. 
Whites, be they men, women, or children — 
murder them indiscriminately, and you will not 
commit any sin;" when one reads this, rubbish 
though it be, and remembers the ignorance and 
prejudice of those who read it and those to 
w^hom it is read, the sheltered humanitarian ism 
of the India Office seems very afternoon-teay 
indeed. "His heart swelled," writes Balzac, 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 183 

"with that dull collected love which we must call 
humanitarianism, the eldest son of deceased phi- 
lanthropy, and which is to the divine charity 
what system is to art, or reasoning to deed." 

Sympathy is the catch-word in India just now. 
One hears it suggested on every hand as the 
remedy for unrest. The kindly feeling for, and 
the understanding of, another's temperament, 
which makes for sympathy, curdles when it is 
forced. I remember a Sunday-school of my boy- 
hood days, where a class of small boys sat in a 
circle around their teacher. The superintendent 
was leading in prayer. One of the small boys 
was gazing about the room. I even remember 
that boy's name: Crosby. His teacher saw his 
inattention and whispered to him fiercely: "Cros- 
by, now you pray!" Through many years that 
scene has been a picture to me of the folly of at- 
tempting to enforce spiritual laws. The present 
situation is not less ridiculous. India kept in 
hand by a small party, mostly of young men in 
the army and the civil service; sport-loving, 
wholesome, unaffected, with no thought, most 
of them, of artifice in their manners or their 
methods, in very many cases adored by their 
men, and of a sudden one hears the voice of 
inexperience, of theoretical enthusiasm, saying: 
"Now, you fellows, sympathize!" and they prob- 



184 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ably sympathize the way Crosby prayed, and 
they would be fools indeed if they did anything 
else. 

There is no cleaner, healthier, better-managed 
colony in the world than Java, and we do not 
consider the Dutch to be either imaginative or 
sympathetic. A man may be fond of children, 
and not care to take his meals with them in the 
nursery, or to give them the run of his study, or 
take them to lunch at his club, or to have them 
camp every night in his bedroom. 

Sir Richard Burton, who knew the ins and 
outs of the Oriental mind if anybody ever did, 
does not hesitate to say that the natives of India 
cannot even respect a European who mixes with 
them. 

The old wholesome theory that the inferior 
should be urged to play up, and be rewarded if 
he did, made us Americans and English what 
we are; the modern theory, born of the miasma 
of the French Revolution, urging the superior 
to play down, will emasculate us inevitably. 

I fail to see any signs, at home or abroad, that 
the coy but none the less calculating professional 
philanthropy of the day has brought about, or is 
on the way to do so, a better feeling between men. 
We are producing artificial relations between men 
in a hot-house, and when they are bedded out 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 185 

to grow, in the competition and strife and tur- 
moil of all weathers and temperatures with which 
life assails them, they wilt even more quickly 
than before they were so carefully tended. If 
you feel your pulse, or watch your breathing, 
or ponder overmuch about your digestion, your 
pulse and your breathing become irregular, and 
your digestion goes wrong. Try it and see. Cer- 
tain human functions are, and must be, auto- 
matic; they are so sensitive that the least inter- 
ference with them, even thinking about them, 
will disarrange them. Certain of the relations 
between men, whether in India or in the negro 
belt in America, or in the squalid quarters of the 
poor in New York or in London, are of that kind. 
If I may be permitted to use a personal illustra- 
tion, I cite my own liking for the negro. I come 
from his country, my family has for many scores 
of years dealt with him and served him, as he 
has served them. I could no more pump up 
this feeling of understanding and sympathy, and 
ability to get on with him, than I could think my- 
self into being a painter, or urge or excite myself 
into being six feet and four inches high. It may 
be asked, then, if the writer is utterly contempt- 
uous of kindly human feeling. No one less so. 
It is the attempt to solve the inevitable problems 
of economic and governmental conditions that 



186 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

are necessarily artificial, by an assumption of 
artificial temperament and manners, that is con- 
demned. 

Civilization in India, and in every great com- 
mercial and political centre of the world to-day, 
is distorted by the political and economic exi- 
gencies of great aggregations of population, fed, 
clothed, and housed by machinery instead of by 
the individual labor of each one. If all the ma- 
chinery in the world to-day in the cotton, com, 
and wheat fields, in the mines, in the great manu- 
factories, in the transportation agencies, in all 
the branches which feed, clothe, house, water, 
and carry us, were suddenly to become useless, 
and could not be repaired ; if our own railroads 
were to be hampered by excitable legislation — if, 
in short, with our present aggregations of popu- 
lation we were obliged to revert to the methods 
of even one hundred years ago, what awful 
plague, famine, and death would follow! This 
means that vast populations are existing to-day 
by the grace of machinery, and not by virtue of 
their own prowess, and practically every social 
problem of the day arises from that and nothing 
else. We are all, more or less, living upon char- 
ity, except the farmer, and not by the exertion 
of our natural and elementary forces ; and it is 
only the strong-willed and the stout-hearted who 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 187 

do not deteriorate in consequence. Those who 
see this may be forgiven for not only believ- 
ing, but knowing, that more philanthropy, that 
more artificial sympathy, only make matters 
worse. 

Modern ingenuity and obedience to the laws 
of hygiene, have brought this enormous brood 
into the world, and we now propose to smile and 
smooth it into contentment. One might as w^ell 
attempt to bring up one's children on the sugar- 
coating of one's wedding cake. 

It is stated that the average length of human 
life in European countries, in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, was between eighteen and twenty years. 
To-day it is between forty and fifty years. The 
death-rate has fallen as man's life has lengthened. 
In the seventeenth century the mortality rate of 
London was 50 per 1,000 of population; to-day 
it is 15 per 1,000 of population. In the year 
1700 the mortality rate of Boston was 34 per 
1,000; to-day it is 19. Within a century, 
London, Berlin, and Munich have cut their 
death-rates nearly in half. In Sweden, the 
home of school gymnastics and government- 
controlled hygiene, the average length of life 
is 50 years for men, and 53 years for women, 
the highest in the world. In the United States, 
the average lifetime is 44 for men, and 46 for 



188 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

women. In India the average lifetime for men 
is 23, and for women 24. It is almost impossible 
to calculate the enormous increase of population 
that these figures suggest; and an increase of the 
number of men and women in the world of ma- 
ture years, whose demands upon life for food, 
for occupation, for education, for amusement, 
and for governing are the demands of grown-up 
people. This single problem of the increase of 
the grown-up population of the world in the last 
two hundred years is never mentioned; and yet 
it is outstanding, ever growing, all-else-includ- 
ing, and as much more overshadowing all other 
problems of civilization as the sky compared to 
tents. To imagine that this greatest problem of 
our time, perhaps of any time, is to be solved by 
doles of money, smiles, and words, is not only 
ridiculous as theory, but is proving itself deplor- 
able as practice. Wherever else the way out of 
the tangle lies, it is not there. To issue orders 
for purdah parties, and for bows and smiles on 
railway trains, makes one doubt the lucid writ- 
ing, the clear thinking, the masterly grasp of great 
problems, for which I for one have admired and 
extolled John Morley for nearly a quarter of a 
century. It is not only no solution of the prob- 
lem in itself, but it is tempting the unthinking 
and superficial to believe that the problem is 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 189 

only as diflScult as the suggestion of such sickly 
remedies implies. 

India has a negligible amount of machinery, 
and an overwhelming population, consequently 
the problem is more acute there than elsewhere; 
but it exists in Germany and in Japan, and while 
it is called "Unrest" in India, it is called the 
"German Peril" in Europe, the "Japanese 
Peril" in America. In addition to this machine- 
made population, there has grown with advanc- 
ing civilization and its wealth, a fashion of re- 
lieving women of all share in productive labor. 
America and England, for example, carry, in- 
dustrially speaking, an enormous weight of idle 
women, the most idle and luxurious of whom do 
not even bear children, and who are the direct 
incentive to extravagance and waste. Fortu- 
nately they are comparatively few in number, but 
they are nevertheless a factor in the problem. 
Let us be frank, therefore, and say at once that 
"Unrest" in India is not an exotic among social 
and economic problems, it is a phase, an Ori- 
ental phase, if you please, which presses upon 
every country in the world, less in the United 
States and in South America than elsewhere 
merely because we have the food supply of the 
world in our hands. 

Manufactured sympathy will solve the prob- 



190 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

lem neither in India nor anywhere else. On 
the contrary the unthinking philanthropist, 
and the cunning politician, not only in India, 
but in England, Germany, France, and Amer- 
ica, are leading whole populations to believe 
that the millions concentrated in a few hands 
are the cause of the poverty and discomfort 
of all the rest. There never was a meaner 
nor a more dangerous lie: first, because it 
tickles the fancy of the people, second, be- 
cause it leads them in a wrong direction for the 
solution of their troubles, and third, because it 
is these very aggregations of capital that alone 
make it possible even to feed these masses of pop- 
ulation. Like every other remedy for human ills, 
if it be easy and pleasant you may be sure it is 
poisonous. There are room, and food, and leis- 
ure, and opportunity for every honest, sober, hard- 
working man in the world, still, whatever the 
future have in store for the rapidly increasing 
population of the world ; but the mill of competi- 
tion is growing more and more terrible as modem 
science fosters the growth of population, and the 
shiftless, the dissipated, and the weak find it 
harder and harder to keep on the road, and out of 
the gutter, as the road becomes more and more 
crowded. "Neither circumcision nor uncircum- 
cision availeth anything, but a new man!" The 



FROM MUGHAL TO BRITON 191 

ghastly gospel which preaches that all our woes 
are due to somebody else, and the demagogic 
apostles of that gospel, will, and can, only land 
their followers in a deeper ditch. Sympathy, 
yes, but easy lies, never. The slightest move in 
this direction, the faintest whisper to these three 
hundred millions in India, would be on a par, 
for fiendish cruelty, with persuading the chil- 
dren of a family that all their woes were due to 
the selfishness of their parents. 



V 

RELIGION AND CASTE IN INDIA 

IN writing a chapter on religion and caste in 
India, as I have seen it, I wish to begin by 
proclaiming how superficial this sketch must 
be, and how well I know what I do not know of 
a subject to which many volumes have been de- 
voted by students of many years' residence in In- 
dia, and for a full analysis and history of which 
many volumes are still needed. 

I am proposing merely to furnish enough mate- 
rial to put the situation before my countrymen, 
and to show how ludicrous is the ideal of self- 
government, as we understand it, for a people 
so unhomogeneous, and how calamitous will be 
the result of going too fast in granting legislative 
privileges. 

First of all, caste is a question of birth, and 
there is no entry except by birth. A worker in 
a coal-mine may become a part owner thereof, 
and his daughter marry a peer, and his grand- 
son become a peer in England. I can personally 
introduce the reader to dozens of still unedu- 

192 



RELIGION AND CASTE 193 

cated clerks, stenographers, mill-hands, newsboys, 
and their wives, widows, sisters, and daughters, 
whose millions seat them at the dinner-tables of 
the Brahman class in America and in England. 
But no millions will enable a low-caste Hindu 
to marry into a Brahman family, or even to 
touch the hand, or throw his shadow on the 
food, of a Brahman in India. 

If a man is excommunicated by his caste fel- 
lows in India, no one of the caste will eat with 
him, accept water from his hands, or marry him. 
His own wife will not touch him or speak with 
him. He is dead to his family. The barber 
even will not shave him, or cut his hair or his 
toe-nails. 

There is no legislation, no police work, no 
trial in the courts, no adjustment of land rev- 
enue or land tenure, no meeting of municipal or 
district councils, no appointment to office small 
or great, no handling of any community in time 
of plague or famine, no hygienic precautions or 
sanitary arrangements, into which does not enter 
this question of caste to complicate, to make diffi- 
cult, and perhaps to foil, the most reasonable and 
necessary work of the administrator. A Brah- 
man clerk has been known to distribute legal 
documents by throwing them down at the end 
of the village street in which live his low-caste 



194 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

brethren. Letter-carriers have been known to 
refuse to enter the houses of, or to permit them- 
selves to come into personal contact with, those 
of a lower status than themselves. 

If one could picture to oneself social snobbery 
lifted into a fanatical religious faith, it would 
be a pale description of the iron subdivisions of 
caste in India, but even then simple as compared 
with the incomprehensible intricacies of this so- 
cial pall. There is no patriotism, and can be 
none, in a country thus divided against itself, 
and divided against itself not geographically but 
socially. 

As I watch for hours at a time the worshippers 
at the Ghats, on the banks of the Ganges at 
Benares, I only find myself more puzzled. It is 
more than complicated, it is cloudy confusion, 
wherein one loses the support even of one's or- 
dinary mental and physical working powers. 

Benares has been the capital of the Hindu re- 
ligion for more years than any historian has 
counted. Buddha, who was bom about 557 and 
who died about 478 B. C, began his public teach- 
ing in the deer-forest near what was even then 
the great city of Benares. For nearly two thou- 
sand five hundred years, of which we have some 
knowledge, and for how many years more no man 
knows, the Hindus have bathed and prayed here 



RELIGION AND CASTE 195 

on the banks of the Ganges. Buddhism and 
Islamism have been absorbed or swept aside. 

It must be said of Buddhism, however, that 
it has left one indelible mark all over India, 
China, and the East, and that is the teaching of 
gentleness and kindness to one another and to 
animals. Buddha taught that life is but a pro- 
longed endeavor to escape from suffering, and 
that, therefore, to cause others to suffer is the un- 
forgivable sin. By meditation a man is to lose 
the sense of the painfulness of life, and to earn 
some mitigation from the cycle through which 
he must pass before reaching Nirvana, where all 
re-birth ends at last, and one loses consciousness 
forever. This creed is pure agnosticism, holding 
that a man's own acts alone make up the tale of 
his faith. 

Agnosticism everywhere throws a man back 
upon himself, and everywhere and always pro- 
duces one of two results. It makes men, as in 
India and China, pessimists, hopeless, helpless, 
and without ambitions for either their souls or 
their bodies ; or it makes men colossal egoists who 
worship themselves. Nothing can be more por- 
tentous of evil to the race than our agnostic de- 
mocracies of the West, which are putting man on 
a pedestal, and waving the incense of eight hours' 
work, old-age pensions, no conscription, a vote 



196 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

for each adult, state support, and so on, before 
him. 

It was a moving spectacle, for example, to all 
students of the ethnic religions when Mr. Keir 
Hardie, as the exponent of Western agnosticism, 
or man as his own god, came out to India to 
preach this doctrine to the Buddhist-impreg- 
nated Indians, steeped in pessimism. They im- 
mediately dubbed him the "King of the Cool- 
ies " and could not wrench their imaginations to 
see how a man of no caste could be worth imi- 
tating or following. The first flash of a picture 
of that which will some day be a terrible conflict 
between the Yellow and the White was revealed 
w^hen the man who cared everything for man 
met the men who care nothing for man, and 
neither understood the other in the least. 

Buddhism has done for the East what ration- 
alism has done for the West; it makes men doubt 
the existence, even deny the existence, of any 
power higher than themselves, but with the abys- 
mal difference that it prostrates man in the East 
while it puts him on a dangerous pinnacle in the 
West. Man with nothing higher than himself 
to obey, to fear, to love, or to placate, becomes 
morally and mentally disorderly. The same is 
true of the state, which brings itself to the con- 
dition where the voting man is paramount, and 



RELIGION AND CASTE 197 

to be feared, obeyed, and placated. With no 
higher ideal than that, a state disintegrates, drifts 
into bureaucracy, then into pensionism, finally 
into the bread-and-circus stage, and then disap- 
pears. Such a failure was Athens, such a fail- 
ure is before our eyes in modern France, France 
the land of pose and phrase, egotism and scepti- 
cism. Even the ethical code of agnosticism 
fades and dies, lacking a higher sanction to 
command obedience. 

Buddha little thought that his teaching of the 
valuelessness of life would result in the callous 
cruelty of the Indian and the Chinese. Rous- 
seau, if he thought about it at all, could hardly 
have dreamed that his scheme of a return to the 
simple and the natural life, with every man equal, 
would make of France a shambles, and produce 
a philosophy of life which, while attempting to 
gain the whole world for each individual, not 
only loses its soul, but loses the whole world, for 
every body of individuals which attempts it. 
The time is still aeons off when each man may 
be his own master. It is a pitiable failure in 
the East. It will prove a colossal failure in the 
West. 

Curiously enough, it was King Asoka, nick- 
named ''The Furious" in his youth, who, in 260 
B. C, became the great apostle and missionary 



•v.* 



198 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

of Buddhism. The lives he had taken, the suf- 
fering he had caused, in the days of his auto- 
cratic sway, led him to find comfort and repent- 
ance in a creed which abhorred the taking of life. 
It was through his influence and the influence 
of his saffron-robed priests, of w^hom he is said 
to have supported forty thousand at his own ex- 
pense, that Buddhism grew from a mere sect 
of enthusiasts into the creed of a third of the 
human race, and spread through Asia and 
parts of Africa and Europe. The Brahmanism 
of Benares is partly the result of this wave of 
Buddhism. It is a gentle, mannerly, soft- 
spoken crowd, absorbed in forgetting that it 
lives. This carelessness of life, on the other 
hand; breaks out in monstrous slaughter and 
sickening brutalities, as in the Mutiny, when it 
loses control of itself. The Mutiny was a pict- 
ure of pessimism let loose; the French Revolu- 
tion was a picture of how rationalism establishes 
the rights of man, or in the happy phrase of that 
most skilful and most brilliant modern political 
diagnostician. Lord Rosebery, ''the fierce equal- 
ity of France." 

Benares at the present time, so far as buildings 
are concerned, is of the most modern. The idol- 
breaking Muhammadans left nothing after their 
conquering of the city except a spiteful mosque. 



RELIGION AND CASTE 199 

built by the fanatical Aurangzeb on one of the 
sacred sites, which still rears its towers above all 
the other buildings on the river bank; and there 
are few buildings of an earlier date than the mid- 
dle of the eighteenth century. But the Ganges 
has never been conquered, nor turned aside, nor 
has the Hindu faith. 

They are here by the thousands this morning, 
washing themselves, washing their clothes, sit- 
ting wrapt in contemplation some of them, only 
their lips moving. Old and young, men and 
women, all bathing, and in curiously decent fash- 
ion. Their arrangement of clothing must be pe- 
culiar, for they undress, and dress, and bathe, 
and somehow each one so manages his or her 
clothing that there is not a hint of indecency or 
even of immodesty. You are rowed along with- 
in a few feet of the bank of the river where these 
thousands are bathing, drying themselves, dress- 
ing and undressing, and nothing could be more 
sedately proper. You see the Brahman rub- 
bing his sacred triple thread round and round 
his shoulder and body, others scrubbing their 
mouths violently with their fingers, others wash- 
ing their clothes, babies being dipped by father 
or mother, and soundly rubbed afterward, youths 
more particular, using combs ; and higher up on 
the bank the barbers are busy, shaving and cut- 



200 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ting hair, while the customer sits cross-legged, 
holding a mirror. 

Even my travelled Brahman friend, who told 
me that he was what we would call a Unitarian, 
wore, and showed me, his sacred thread. The 
Rajput father binds round the arm of his sen a 
string made of a sacred grass which is to ward off 
evil spirits. No doubt the sacred cord of the 
twice-born castes of India originated in a simi- 
lar belief. The cord is made in various ways. 
"Among the Madras Brahmans, who are most 
careful in such matters, it is of fine country- 
grown cotton, not foreign, and spun by hand. 
Three very fine threads are twisted by a Brah- 
man into a single cord sixteen feet long. He then 
squats on the ground, winds it thrice around his 
knees, and fastens the ends in a special knot 
known as that of Brahma." In the north, the 
four fingers of the hand are closed, and a thread 
is wound back and fourth over them ninety-six 
times. This thread forms one strand of the cord, 
and three of them make it complete. During 
worship of the gods it remains over the left shoul- 
der; when the wearer is unclean, or when he per- 
forms the rites for the dead, he shifts it to the 
right shoulder. 

The thread is put on a boy between his eighth 
and twelfth year, when he is supposed to assume 



RELIGION AND CASTE 201 

the religious obligations and the authority and 
duty of a Brahman. When the thread is first 
put on the boy he makes pretence of leaving the 
house to become an ascetic, but he is, of course, 
persuaded to return and live as a layman. 

It seemed to me strange that there was no 
swimming. In any Western crowd there would 
have been scores of boys and men diving, swim- 
ming, playing games in the water; but there is 
no sign of any desire for exercise or play here. 
Rubbing themselves, thrashing their clothes on 
the flat rocks, moving their lips and hands in 
prayer, but no other exercise. 

They are a sitting, riding race, not a walking 
or running one. Their posture is as peculiar 
to them as their color. It is always the same, 
wherever you see them, whether it be the prince 
in his palace, these people praying by the river- 
bank, the passengers waiting for the train at the 
railway stations, or sitting on the seats in the 
train, your bearer waiting outside your door, or 
the cab-driver on his box in the great cities. The 
hinges in their knees must be different from ours. 
They squat down with their knee-caps under 
their chins, and that part of their persons which 
the French describe as ow le dos change de nom 
close up against their heels. I was told at TJdai- 
pur that His Highness, the Maharana of Udaipur, 



202 THE ^NEST IN THE EAST 

has no chairs in his private apartments, but al- 
ways sits cross-legged on the floor, whether to eat, 
or to read , or to rest. When you return to your cab 
you will find the driver almost invariably perched 
up on the seat with his legs under him. Thou- 
sands of years of chairlessness have made this 
the most comfortable posture for them. I sup- 
pose in a country of three hundred millions of 
people there is only room for them to sit on the 
ground, and, at any rate, among these people 
there is no money to provide any piece of furni- 
ture which is, at one and the same time, so con- 
venient to carry, and so cheaply upholstered, as 
that part of the person, oil le dos change de noni! 
Benares is evidently a cosmopolitan place; you 
notice the difference in the people as you drive 
or walk through the streets. They are less shy, 
the women do not cover their faces so care- 
fully, they are more accustomed to strangers, and 
well they may be, since it is estimated that there 
are a million pilgrims here every year, who come 
to bathe, to pray, and to take the long, dusty 
walk, or pilgrimage, of some forty-five miles, 
around the sacred precincts of the city. Into the 
sacred waters of the Ganges, too, every Hindu 
wishes his ashes thrown. At one of the Ghats on 
the bank I saw bodies burning, and others lying 
waiting to be burned. 



RELEGION AND CASTE £03 

Both here and at Bombay I have been present 
at these burnings. The bodies are brought in 
on a frail litter. A pile of logs is built up, held 
in place by four iron stanchions. The body 
with the head uncovered is placed on the logs, 
more logs are piled on top, the litter is broken 
up and added to the small fagots underneath, and 
the fire is lighted. There are various ceremo- 
nies connected with the rite. The body is car- 
ried several times around the pile before being 
placed upon it. The nearest relative walks 
around the pile with a jar of water, letting it drip 
down as he goes, till of a sudden he dashes the 
jar to the ground, breaking it to pieces. A sym- 
bol of all life, everywhere. At a certain mo- 
ment, too, the skull is fractured by the nearest 
relative, to allow the easy escape of the spirit to 
another world. Where the deceased is rich, the 
fire is made of costly and sweet-smelling wood, 
sandal-wood and the like, and the ceremonies 
are more elaborate and more prolonged. No 
doubt it is the ideal way to dispose of a dead 
body, but when I have seen it done here it 
seemed to me a callous and a careless rite. 

It is true, if one have faith death should not be 
a cause of mourning, but parting from those one 
adores is a poignant sorrow, even if there is to be 
another meeting here on earth. So far as I have 



204 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

studied the faces of mourners here, I could see 
nothing. In these matters they are either be- 
hind or very far in advance of us. No doubt 
Mrs. Annie Besant, who has her Hindu College 
here at Benares, and her Theosophical Institu- 
tion at Adyar near Madras, would maintain the 
latter. She and her former associates Colonel 
Olcott and Madame Blavatsky preach the su- 
periority of the Hindu system to any philosophy 
or religion of the West. One cannot perhaps 
curtail the freedom of speech of these people, 
but they can hardly be accepted as scholarly 
authorities in the study of the ethnic religions. 
It would be a useful addition to the curriculum 
of one of our great universities if there could be 
lectures on applied ethnic religions, as there are 
lectures on applied ethics. I have noticed all 
over India the absolute indifference of the natives 
themselves to the pain, and deformities and mal- 
adies that are displayed as an excuse for alms. 
It is not the stoicism of our Western Indians who 
thought it dishonorable to show fear, or to shrink 
from pain, but an imbedded indifference, a 
numbness to this particular influence. We, on 
the contrary, dislike the sight of these things, and 
turn from them, and pity is forced from us, but 
all such spectacles seem to pass absolutely un- 
noticed by the Oriental. And what horrible de- 



RELIGION AND CASTE 205 

formities are exhibited! One might think them 
invented and carved, so hideously grotesque are 
they sometimes. 

It is a wonder there are not more. A wonder, 
too, that there is not more plague, more cholera, 
more disease of every kind. Here on the banks 
of this river are thousands, bathing, washing 
their clothes, and drinking, all within a few 
yards of one another. One man drinks the 
dregs from another man's body, another the 
scourings from another's clothes, and women 
and children the same. It is not strange that 
India is the paradise of contagion. 

I have heard it maintained that the Ganges, 
which is the most bathed-in river in the world, 
is different from other rivers, in that the water 
itself has certain antiseptic qualities, and that 
microbes do not flourish in it as in other waters. 
If one rows up and down the river front, or walks 
through the narrow streets leading to the river, 
the stench and mud and crowds make it appear 
a very incubator of microbes. 

I stood for a long time within a small court, 
in the middle of which was a much-frequented 
temple. Cows stood about in their own filth, 
men, women, and children crowded in, went to 
the shrine where they bowed and prayed, and 
were given something by the attendant, or priest. 



206 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

which they popped into their mouths. Some 
came away with garlands, but all of them evi- 
dently impervious to the smells and the mud. It 
was warm outside, but in this particular tem- 
ple the smell of hot humanity, and hot cow, was 
sickening. 

Nor Mecca, nor Jerusalem has known such 
hordes of worshippers, so many thousands of 
years of continuous pilgrimage. No matter 
what his caste, no matter what his occupation, no 
matter how black his heart or red his hands, the 
Hindu who dies within a radius of fifty miles of 
Benares is spared all future torment, so it is said. 

In the theory of the transmigration of souls, 
or metempsychosis, the Hindu believes that there 
are some millions of species of animals that he 
may be obliged to pass through, one after an- 
other, before he arrives at the house of his god, 
if he does not pay due attention to the duties and 
formalities of his religion. This saving of one's 
own soul becomes a very important business un- 
der these circumstances. The hell of the most 
enthusiastic revivalist is a very lukewarm affair 
when compared with this interminable vista of 
animal impersonations which confronts the pious 
Hindu. 

The upper classes and intelligent Hindus have 
become Theists, but the mass of the Hindu world 



RELIGION AND CASTE 207 

are crass Polytheists, who worship not only end- 
less named gods, but sticks and stones, and trees, 
and mounds of earth of their own choosing and 
making. On one occasion I asked a lower-caste 
Hindu, who had been very attentive in his ser- 
vice, if I was not taking too much of his time. I 
had noticed that his forehead w^as not marked, a 
sign that he had not bathed and prayed as his 
ritual requires. "Oh," he replied, "I have my 
own private god in my compound!" On the 
other hand, an educated and travelled Hindu, 
of whom I saw a good deal, told me that he was 
what we would call a "Unitarian!" Another 
Brahman, of the mystical type, is said to have 
remarked quite casually: "I have never seen 
Christ myself, but I have a friend who often sees 
him, and he tells my friend that he finds many 
of his followers very trying people." 

I remember I took a course of study in the 
Ethnic Religions when at the University, but of 
these mystic refinements on the one hand, and 
these crudities on the other, I knew nothing till 
I was face to face with them here. One is rather 
shocked at the abysmal gulf between the book 
and the fact, between the professorial teaching 
and the practice, when one is brought into close 
contact with the latter in India. As I stand be- 
side the reeking cow, ankle-deep in filth, in the 



208 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

temple of this dark, crowded court in Benares, 
and see the earnestness of the worshippers, I am 
impressed by the fact that all I know, or may 
have known, or shall know, is of little use in 
interpreting this situation which is here and 
now, and which has been for thousands of 
years. 

All religions really, whether of Buddha, Brah- 
ma, Muhammad, or Christ, maintain that life 
is to die. The Buddhist and the Brahman and 
the Muhammadan stick to the original text, to 
the primitive message. We Westerners have 
twisted the Christianity of Christ into a code and 
a creed suited to our climate, our environment, 
our temperament, and our ambitions, and we 
maintain that life is to live. But no philosophy 
and no religion which has its roots in the East 
can be fairly interpreted as giving such a mes- 
sage. We have interpreted isolated texts to please 
our love of life, but the founder of Christianity 
was an Oriental, with the same profound con- 
viction that "my Father's many mansions" are 
preferable to hut or palace here, which char- 
acterizes the creeds of the Buddhist, the Brah- 
man, and the Muhammadan. The Buddhist is 
a Buddhist, the Brahman is a Brahman, the Mu- 
hammadan is a Muhammadan but we West- 
erners are not Christians. We merely wear an 



RELIGION AND CASTE 209 

ethical cloak, made up of a patchwork of sayings^ 
which we have wrenched from their context, to 
enable us to do our work in the world with free- 
dom of movement. Were we to wrap ourselves 
in the genuine robes of Christianity we should be 
as hampered, and as helpless, as are the thor- 
ough-going disciples of Buddha, Brahma, or 
Muhammad. 

Hinduism is not only a religious bond, but it 
is also a sort of social league governing all the re- 
lations of life. As a social league it rests upon 
caste, that immovable barrier against reform or 
progress ; as a religious bond it rests upon a union 
of the Aryan and the Buddhistic faith. Hindu- 
ism recognized the so-called twice-born, or Aryan 
castes, that is, the Brahmans or priests, the Kshat- 
triyas or warriors, the Vaisyas or agriculturists, 
and the Sudras or serfs. But this is a mere guide- 
book classification. If you investigate the make- 
up of an Indian village you may find herdsmen, 
fishermen, weavers, artisans, barbers, coolies, 
some Muhammadans, some Brahmans, traders, 
money-lenders, and here and there Mahrattas, 
and a few other immigrants. But even these di- 
visions do not begin to complete the list, for there 
are still subdivisions of these. Even the Brah- 
mans have ten distinct classes or nations, and 
these again are divided into some two thousand 



210 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

tribes. In Bombay alone, where there are more 
than a million Brahmans, there are some two 
hundred groups of them, none of which inter- 
marries with another. In INIadras there are six 
groups, each speaking a different tongue, and no 
member of one group will marry or eat with the 
member of another; while each of these groups, 
again, has rules regarding the persons within its 
own circle, with whom its members may marry 
or eat cooked food. 

The Brahmans of the south of India claim to 
be of higher rank than the Brahmans of the north, 
holding that the Brahmanism of the north has 
been defiled by one conqueror after another, 
while they of the south have remained more or 
less untouched by foreign influences. Unlike 
the northern Brahman, there is no lower caste 
from whom the southern Brahman will take 
water. 

In this matter of religion, as in political and 
social matters, the women of India are bigotedly 
conservative, and insistent upon maintaining 
all the traditional observances. The most out- 
spoken and the fiercest rebels against the Eng- 
lish power whom I met in India were women. 
The two I remember best were, one the wife of 
a prominent Maharaja, and the other the sis- 
ter of a distinguished Muhammadan. They were 



RELIGION AND CASTE 211 

ready to take any measures to rid India of Brit- 
ish rule. So, too, the Kshattriyas, or Rajputs, 
are divided into some six hundred tribes in differ- 
ent parts of India. The authorities say that it 
is impossible to number all the castes in India. 
They number thousands at least. 

WTien it is remembered that the members of 
these different castes cannot intermarry, cannot 
eat together, and that as a rule no Hindu of good 
caste may eat food prepared by a man of inferior 
caste, and that much the same rule obtains in 
regard to the drinking of water, one begins to un- 
derstand dimly the difficulties inherent in any 
dealings with these people, whether for hygienic, 
social, or military purposes. Verily, their ways 
are not as our ways. Even at the railway sta- 
tions in some parts of India you see notices 
posted: "Water for Hindus." "Water for Mu- 
hammadans." 

Just as one example, imagine the difficulty 
of helpfulness to one another when the neglected 
and the help-needing person may be one whom 
to touch, or to come in contact with in any way, 
is a social and religious degradation, imperilling 
not only one's social position, but one's salvation. 
The enlightened ruler of Baroda, His Highness, 
the Gaekwar, calls these people the "Untoucha- 
bles," a very happy description of them, and he 



212 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

estimates their numbers at six million, or a fifth 
of the population. He, a Hindu of the Maratha 
branch himself, says: "The system \yhich divides 
us into innumerable castes, claiming to rise by 
minutely graduated steps from the Pariah to the 
Brahman, is a whole tissue of injustice, split- 
ting men equal by nature into divisions high and 
low, based not on the natural standard of per- 
sonal qualities, but on the accident of birth. 
The eternal struggle between caste and caste for 
social superiority has become a source of con- 
stant ill-feeling in these days. The human de- 
sire to help the members of one's caste also leads 
to nepotism, heart-burnings, and consequent mu- 
tual distrust." 

The polluting power of a cat, as an example 
of the intricacies of this subject of caste, is small, 
of a dog greater, but nothing equals the pol- 
lution of a Pariah. Man, in this connection, is 
degraded below the beasts. Such people are de- 
nied the advantages of social sympathy and in- 
dustrial aid. They are denied all influence for 
good, arising out of free intercourse with their 
neighbors. The full and free use of hospitals, 
of public inns, public conveyances, wells, and 
even temples, is withheld from them. They are 
even refused the opportunities of earning a liv- 
ing. Menial service even is denied them, as they 



RELIGION AND CASTE 213 

cannot touch the food or enter the houses of the 
higher castes. 

My friend, the Maharaja Gaekwar of Baroda, 
is possibly the most outspoken prince in India, 
so I quote another saying of his, that my readers 
may know something of his poKtical and social 
views: *'I can quite understand the difficulty in- 
volved in giving up one's inherited ideals of 
thought and custom, especially in conservative 
India. If the Indian people wish to progress, 
and to make the most of their national influence, 
they must consciously give up these old false 
ideals and open their eyes to the light of prog- 
ress, in which not one class or many classes, but 
all shall share. Men are asking for a constitu- 
tion, by which they may limit the powers of 
princes and governments; they neglect to limit 
the tyrannical and despotic sway of religion, 
which is crushing the life out of our people by 
driving out of them all sense of personal pride, 
all individuality and ambition. There is no 
room in the world of to-day for such priests as are 
little gods with an exaggerated idea of their own 
importance, insisting upon their infallibility, con- 
tent with ignorance, contemptuous of knowledge. 
Priests of this kind are a drag on the wheels of 
progress. Instead of ministering to the people 
they are their bad angels." 



214 THE WEST IN THE Ex\ST 

Sir Harry Johnston, who at least cannot be ac- 
cused of not knowing India, writes: "The one 
hundred and sixty-two million Hindu men and 
women and children follow for the most paii; 
wholly unreasonable forms of religion, quite in- 
compatible with modern ideas of physical devel- 
opment, social progress, sanitation, avoidance 
of cruelty, and unrestricted intercourse with one's 
fellow-men." To this he adds: "If all forms 
of the Hindu religion — Brahmanism — could be 
submitted to an impartial world-congress of non- 
Hindus, the members of which were selected from 
all parts of non-Hindu Asia, from America, Eu- 
rope, and Africa, the Hindu religion would be 
universally condemned as a mixture of night- 
mare nonsense and time-wasting rubbish, ful- 
filling no useful end whatever, only adding to 
the general burden borne by humanity in its 
struggle for existence. And, of course, so long 
as two hundred million Indians remain attached 
to these preposterous faiths, with their absurd 
and useless ceremonials and food taboos, so long 
— if for that reason alone — will the British be 
justified in ruling the Indian Empire with some 
degree of absolutism." 

In this connection, one should remember that of 
the sixty-five million Muhammadans, about fifty- 
five per cent of the male adults can read and write 



RELIGION AND CASTE 215 

in Hindustani, and some ten per cent are ac- 
quainted with English; while of the one hun- 
dred and sixty-two million Hindus only twenty 
per cent of the adult males can read and write 
in the vernacular, and only three per cent are 
acquainted with English. 

It is somewhat disconcerting to an observer 
and student of Indian affairs, therefore, to find 
that it is from the Hindu element and largely 
from the Brahman caste that the murderers, 
bomb-throwers, seditious editors of the vernac- 
ular press, and the men who shoot down the 
English officials on platforms and in theatres are 
drawn. It can only mean that the great Brah- 
man caste, which for centuries have been the 
social and political leaders of these timid and 
ignorant masses, are jealous of the English au- 
thority. Instead of aiding in all efforts to im- 
prove the sanitation, in all efforts to protect the 
peasant from the money-lender, in all schemes 
for irrigation and education, the Brahman is the 
leader of the reactionist party. He prefers, ap- 
parently, that the mass of the people should re- 
main ignorant, debased, diseased, and helpless, 
as his position is magnified by just the width of 
the social chasm between himself and them. He 
both hates the English and despises his own peo- 
ple. He and his people have been the victims of 



216 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

the Turk, the Tartar, the Mongol, who, times 
without number, have swept through the Afghan 
passes, and robbed, slaughtered, and deflowered, 
but he has always heretofore reappeared as the 
religious, social, and political lord of these poor 
people. He would rather have chaos again than 
see his acknow^ledged superiority slip away from 
him, through the uplifting of the masses, slow 
though the process be, by the English rulers. 

There are numbers of sympathizers with the 
so-called Indian patriots in America, who con- 
tribute to their funds and to their excitement. 
They should realize that it is the Brahman agi- 
tator they are backing, and they should take 
some pains to assure themselves that they are not 
putting their money on the wrong horse. It is 
well enough to sympathize with, I will go farther 
and say, and to help any body of men suffering 
from the tyranny of injustice and brutality, 
whether at home or abroad. Though we have 
many such down-trodden people in America 
needing attention, it is perhaps excusable in cer- 
tain temperaments to prefer the excitement of 
participation in revolutions abroad, where at any 
rate their own skins may remain whole, whatever 
happens. But this attempt of the Brahman agi- 
tators to oust the British, or at all events to gain 
more offices, more authority, and more power for 



RELIGION AND CASTE 217 

themselves, is an effort to replace British control 
by the rule of the Brahman, which represents the 
most tyrannical, the most un-American, and the 
most revolting social, religious, and political 
autocracy the world has ever seen. How any 
American, whatever his ideals or his sympathies, 
can lend his influence in support of a movement 
to increase the power of the Brahman caste in 
India, politically or otherwise, can only be ex- 
plained on two grounds : he is either maliciously 
mischievous, or he is ignorant. If one were to 
search the world to find ideals utterly unlike, and 
destructive of American ideals of government, of 
religious liberty, and of social freedom, he could 
find them nowhere better than in Brahmanism. 
The Brahman has never been a fighting-man ; 
he has fattened upon superstition, and conse- 
quently has aided it, and continues to encour- 
age it to the utmost, and holds, consequently, 
the strange position in India of being a sedi- 
tionist as against the English and a reactionary 
as against his own people. There is a harsher 
word than I care to use for this type of citizen, 
but whatever he may be, he is distinctly a 
stumbling-block in the present situation. Men 
who ask for larger representation in the govern- 
ment, knowing full well that they alone are suf- 
ficiently educated to profit by it, and who are 



218 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

inciting the weak-minded to assassinate, and the 
ignorant to balk, the alien reformers, are difficult 
to deal with, especially when one hears on every 
side from disinterested natives that they tremble 
at the idea of their future magistrates, having 
as much concern with the increase of their sal- 
ary as with their caste elevation, and who say: 
*'It would be treason to humanity to place us 
by force of British bayonets under the yoke of 
those whose flesh creeps on their bones when 
they hear of war." I quote from a Rajput noble 
of Oudh. 

We have only to picture to ourselves the Pres- 
byterians, the Methodists, the Catholics, the 
Episcopalians, and the railway employees, the 
shop-keepers, the clerks, the barbers, the butch- 
ers, the money-lenders, and the lowest class of 
laborers, say in Utica, N. Y., divided into sects 
and sub-sects, not permitted to intermarry, to eat 
together or to touch food cooked one for the 
other, to get an idea of the helpless chaos so far 
as any effective work or progress as a community 
is concerned. And this is by no means an ex- 
aggerated picture of thousands of communities 
all over India. On the contrary, it is but a 
very rough sketch of communities far more mi- 
nutely subdivided and far more intricately dis- 
associated. 



RELIGION AND CASTE 219 

This system of caste, which, by the way, is 
the great stumbling-block in the way of native 
reformers, whether revolutionary or otherwise, is 
not limited to social and religious matters, but 
permeates even the industries of the people, since 
each caste is also, in a way, a sort of trade-guild. 
It makes laws and rules for the different trades, 
and even goes so far as to promote and support 
strikes. 

This is but a passing and superficial state- 
ment of a most intricate, and to the Western mind 
most incomprehensible, social and religious con- 
dition. I mention it not as an indication of eru- 
dition, nor as an attempt to explain or to make 
clear what years of study and experience would 
hardly compass, but to give an example of one 
of the most difficult problems facing the Eng- 
lish administrators of this huge continent. 

It is easy to see that the visible ruler is soon, 
and surely, held responsible for everything that 
goes wrong. The English government has in- 
troduced authority which insists upon standing 
absolutely aloof, as it must, from all interfer- 
ence in religious matters. But here, as we have 
seen, the religious life begins with the brush- 
ing of the teeth in the morning, and thoroughly 
permeates the hourly life of the people, their 
eating, drinking, marrying, and dying. There 



220 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

are new and strange desires, there are distress 
and discontent among the peasants, there is a 
rearrangement of classes, there is the ignoring of 
caste, as in the railway trains, where all must of 
necessity be treated alike. 

Fancy the New York Central Railway at- 
tempting to cater to the prejudices of Catholics 
and Unitarians, Vegetarians and Christian Scien- 
tists, New York hoodlums and Brahmans from 
Boston, and when I say that such a problem 
is easy as compared to this problem of caste 
in India, I tell even less than the bare truth. 
The government is, of course, blamed for 
this by the ignorant. The sages and teach- 
ers of the Hindus have been preaching for cen- 
turies asceticism as an escape from the distresses 
and wearisome problems of life. Now comes a 
spirit of progress, rejoicing in and lauding ma- 
terial possessions, comfort, and the prolongation 
of life. Life is to be a struggle to overcome the 
impediments, whether physical or climatic, to 
an agreeable existence even in India. Men are 
pushed forward to live, and to live as comforta- 
bly as possible, who heretofore have been taught 
that the heights of human perfection are reached 
only by those who live most simply, who ignore 
most completely the material side of life, and 
who quit most speedily this tenement for another. 



RELIGION AND CASTE 221 

The Brahman looked forward to absorption in 
Brahma, the Buddhist to Nirvana, or absolute 
loss of consciousness, so far as the material world 
is concerned. 

There was a thick-headed citizen of Mar- 
seilles who was know^n to have little enthusiasm 
for the church, but who was none the less a fre- 
quent attendant at mass. When asked why he 
attended mass, he replied: "Oh, j'attends que 
9a soit fini!" There are millions in India who 
have that hopeless, helpless air. Their whole 
physical and mental attitude seems to say: "Oh, 
nous attendons que 9a soit fini ! " Into this state 
of mind, into this situation, the Englishman in- 
troduces the wedge of Western civilization. Rail- 
ways, telegraph wires, canals, hospitals, dispen- 
saries, police, justice without bribery, and the 
cheery Englishman himself, playing, shooting, 
making himself comfortable, doing his duty, and 
hoping and believing in, not only to-morrow, but 
the day after to-morrow. "You need not die if 
you don't want to ! " this Western civilization says 
to three hundred million people who have seen lit- 
tle in life but to die; who look upon disease and dis- 
aster, famine and plague, as visitations of God; 
who, some of them, have held it blasphemy to 
try to cure a small-pox patient, because it must 
be a very powerful god who could produce such 



222 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

an awful disease. In this connection it is fair 
to remind readers that even the English were 
frightened when vaccination was first intro- 
duced, and the more ignorant expressed the fear, 
that the race might become minotaurs: semi' 
bovemqtie virum, semivirumque hovem, England 
comes blandly ignoring these gods, smilingly sure 
that life is worth living, and ready to spend an 
immense amount of energy in giving to life, 
what every Englishman all over the world be- 
lieves to be the only proper setting for such a 
jewel — comfort! England comes offering prizes 
to those who win material prosperity, and these 
people have not merely been taught, but have 
had it ground into them for centuries, that ma- 
terial possessions are merely the hampering bag- 
gage of spirits, which should be always on the 
alert to escape to another place. 

India, for all these centuries, has had no stand- 
ards but those of birth, blood, caste, and the 
personal power of conquest. Poverty was no 
disgrace; on the contrary, the religious beggar, 
the Brahman, the Buddhist priest, however poor, 
was a person of dignity, looked up to, and rever- 
enced, because he had stripped himself of every 
form of wealth. Now India is being inoculated 
with the economic lymph of the West. They 
see men treated with respect, and placed in dig- 



RELIGION AND CASTE 223 

nified positions, partly at least because they are 
rich. It is hard, for an American particularly, 
to understand what a tremendous change this 
marks for India. What a man accumulates and 
holds counts. This is new to India. This situa- 
tion adds measurably to the existing discontent 
of an ever-increasing number, who measuring 
themselves by this entirely new standard find in- 
equalities they equally dislike and do not un- 
derstand. 

They are beginning to wonder if one may 
not at the same time be holy and rich. It is 
easier to be good than to be rich and vulgar, 
they see evidences of this, but many, none the 
less, are being influenced to prefer the latter. 

Their own miseries were not enough. They 
have now this new source of discontent, the poi- 
son of the West; the standard of money! The 
social and even political tyranny of the irrespon- 
sible rich is yet to be their portion, and their po- 
tion, and it will prove more unpalatable to them 
than any that has yet been forced upon them. 
They must go through all this, and then, alas! 
learn all over again that comfort is not prosper- 
ity, that luxury is not culture, and that a mind 
besmeared with odds and ends of learning is not 
education. Even England and America are only 
just beginning to see this. 



224 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

So far as the masses of India are concerned, 
they still preserve and adhere to their centuries- 
old polytheism, they worship innumerable gods; 
the class slightly above them still worship the 
gods of the Hindu pantheon as manifestations 
of divinity which is everywhere, in short, they 
are Pantheists; while the students, and teachers, 
and intellectuals of the higher castes are weav- 
ing and unravelling the fine theological threads 
which were doing duty for the scholars' exercises 
of the fourth century and the school-men of the 
Middle Ages. Mr. K. G. Gupta, writing of 
orthodox Hinduism, says, ''It is mainly and 
substantially idolatrous; and image-worship, in 
which anthropomorphism plays an important 
part, is its principal feature. It has many cults, 
many sects, each having its special gods and god- 
desses, but all combine to venerate the entire 
Hindu pantheon. The worship of a certain 
deity representing the active female principle of 
the universe is never complete without the shed- 
ding of blood, and she has even to plead guilty 
to a hankering for human sacrifice." There is 
more than one example, even of late years, where 
this goddess has been offered human sacrifices 
by her ignorant worshippers. 

If there were no problems of taxation, of hy- 
giene and sanitation, of education, of adminis- 



RELIGION AND CASTE 225 

tration, of safeguarding the country within and 
from without against sedition and attack, to cure 
this disease of the religious and social skin, within 
which these people move and have their preju- 
dices, were surely a task of momentous difficulty 
in and of itself. Fortunately for the problem, and 
probably for themselves, this hard-playing, unan- 
alyzing, governing race of Englishmen, with un- 
bounded confidence in themselves, take all these 
matters so lightly, ignore them so placidly, dis- 
cuss them so flippantly, that for them they cease 
to exist. They come and stare at Benares like 
children at a pantomime, then return to deal 
justly and patiently with three hundred million 
wards, as though the whole spiritual and intel- 
lectual life of thousands of years and millions of 
subjects did not exist. 

This ignorance and confidence explain their 
success, but these ignored problems are none the 
less the fundamental cause of most of their anx- 
ieties. These people are so split up into factions, 
racial, religious, social, and political, that they 
cannot combine to free themselves from their 
governors. Herein lies the safety of the Eng- 
lish. But 1857, the year of the Mutiny, showed 
that if once the religious prejudices can be 
touched, then the fire will light and burn. Once 
the Muhammadans were persuaded that the ab- 



226 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

horred pig, and the Hindus that the sacred cow, 
were used to make the grease for their cart- 
ridges, and that the Russians were beating their 
supposedly unbeatable conquerors in the Crimea, 
they threw off all allegiance, they forsook friends, 
they killed companions and broke the bonds of 
years, to an extent that their own officers, who 
had lived in the closest intercourse with them, 
could not believe possible. 

The seditionist of to-day knows full well the 
strings to pull to produce another uprising. Not 
many months ago it was going the rounds that 
the bone-dust of animals was to be mixed with 
the sugar, and the Japanese success over white 
opponents has been used to the full to inflame 
their warlike ambitions. It is only some such 
attack upon their religious and racial sensibili- 
ties and prejudices that can pervade the mass of 
the people, and the Indian anarchist knows it, 
and is nowadays again on the lookout for some 
such materials to start the blaze. 

It is to be remembered, too, as an important 
factor in any discussion of caste, that peace has 
been maintained in the past, in these thousands 
of communities all over India, because the as- 
sembly, such as it is, has been influenced by the 
men entitled to influence it. When caste is 
destroyed, into whose hands will this governing 



RELIGION AND CASTE 227 

power in all these small communities fall ? The 
English thus far have left, to a large extent, these 
smaller offices in the hands of those who have 
always asserted their right to them by reason of 
their blood or caste standing, a right, be it said, 
universally and contentedly recognized. There 
is no new influence, no new arrangement to sup- 
plant this old system, and the old system of caste 
is being, even though very slowly, corroded and 
eaten away by the civilization of the West. When 
it disappears, the governors of India will have an- 
other difficult problem to face. They will have 
reached the summit of one mountain of reform 
only to see another peak beyond. Caste may 
interfere with progress, but it undoubtedly helps 
mightily to preserve the peace. Caste is a bet- 
ter policeman even than the Englishman. Once 
this system, which has permeated for thousands 
of years and still does permeate all classes in 
India, is weakened, or ridiculed out of exist- 
ence, all sorts of other superstitions will follow 
to create trouble. 

There were actual riots in the streets of the 
capital of Korea, some years ago, due to a wide- 
spread report that the American missionaries 
were boiling Korean babies to manufacture 
chemicals for photographic processes. This was, 
indeed, a tribute to Yankee ingenuity, but it is 



228 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

also an illustration of what preposterous meth- 
ods may be used successfully to breed trouble 
among masses of ignorant people. 

It is an interesting commentary upon the im- 
partial attitude of the English, that while they 
pay and protect missionaries in India and else- 
where, they are at the same time large manu- 
facturers and shippers of idols to these same 
countries. 

The ordained missionaries in India number 
something over a thousand, with about the same 
number of native pastors. They have made 
practically no impression upon India, and the 
best of them, both European and native, admit 
as much themselves. The converts are almost 
entirely from the lowest class of natives, and from 
the Eurasians, that is, those of mixed European 
and Indian parentage, a class, by the way, 
for whom one has much sympathy, as they are 
equally despised and rejected by the English 
and the Indians. "In ninety-nine cases out of a 
hundred (always excepting the Roman Catholic 
Christians of the West Coast) to be a Christian 
is to have been a pariah," writes Stanley Rice, a 
recognized authority on the subject. Medical 
assistance, teaching, and so on by the mission- 
aries are valuable, but I doubt whether either 
the civilian or the soldier would not willingly see 



RELIGION AND CASTE 229 

the whole band of missionaries sent home. 
Their interest in the native sometimes gets to the 
point of mawkishness, leading the native to over- 
estimate his own importance, and weakening his 
respect for authority. Upon the better-class 
Indian mind, the necessary assumption of omni- 
science which must underlie all foreign mission- 
ary effort, particularly when many of the mission- 
aries are distinctly of the social and intellectual 
mediocrity, produces an invulnerable dislike. To 
them the theological crazy-quilt, offered them as 
a coverlet for their salvation, a patchwork of 
Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic, Baptist, Meth- 
odist, Lutheran, and Universalist, must lack dig- 
nity, subtlety, and beauty of outline. 

The Sanskrit word for caste is color. A phi- 
lologist might argue that this matter of caste prob- 
ably dated from the time when the swarms of 
white Aryans came to India, and wished to cut 
themselves off and to keep themselves apart from 
the darker races they found there. The mission- 
ary finds himself balked in his endeavors by his 
own logic. If the incarnation is true, then no 
race which is Christian can remain ostracized 
from and by other Christian races. The Euro- 
pean Christians in India are a caste by them- 
selves. They will not hear of much social inter- 
course, or of intermarriap-e. Indian Christians 



230 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

are even barred from the Transvaal by their 
brother Christians there. White Christians re- 
fuse to meet African Christians even at the sacra- 
ment; much more strongly do they persist in os- 
tracizing them socially. 

Whatever the Indian may be physically and 
morally, he is admittedly subtle mentally. To 
preach brotherly love at the table of the holy 
communion, and to be ready to slay the man who 
should propose social intercourse, or marriage, 
with your sisters or daughters, is a difficult di- 
lemma, a hornless dilemma, in fact, for the mis- 
sionary. For the convert, belief in the incarna- 
tion is indispensable, but for the white converter 
to carry out the plain prescriptions of the incar- 
nation is a crime against his race. It is safe to 
say that there will be no great missionary prog- 
ress among the colored races until this problem 
is solved. It is not surprising that the rooted 
beliefs of the East are sometimes puzzled into 
ferocity. And, alas! I am J)ound to admit, as an 
outsider, that I am not sure that one does not 
see Buddha, Confucius, or Muhammad in the 
streets of Rangoon, Peking, and Peshawar, quite 
as often as one sees Jesus of Nazareth in the 
streets of London, Paris, or New York. 

A dozen unmarried women, singing and beat- 
ing tambourines, accompanied and led by one 



RELIGION AND CASTE 231 

man, must necessarily daunt the credulity of the 
Muhammadan or the Chinese Buddhist. The 
only effective missionaries I have ever met, either 
at home or abroad, are those few people, men 
and women, who never preach, never pray in 
public, and never by any chance argue, but who 
make us humble and ashamed by being better 
than we are. They convert us by their unvoiced 
consistency of conduct. They are unsalaried, 
unconscious, but none the less the saviours of the 
world. There are, and always have been, a few 
lay Englishmen of that stamp in India, and I 
have seen some of their converts, and they are 
the only converted ones in all India for whose 
faith or courage I would give a fig, when put to 
the test of the shadow of the cross, or the edge of 
a sword. That stanch and fearless churchman, 
Bishop Creighton, told less than the truth when 
he said: **The conscious missionary is a bore." 
He is often a menace to peace. It has been 
suggested that one reason there are so many 
heathen is that missionaries so often illustrate 
in their own persons the unpleasant effects of 
salvation. 

Praying to a congregation, or to any audi- 
ence, any prayer, indeed, except it be inaudible 
and in the closet, would seem to be a most 
dangerous and daring form of spiritual exer- 



232 THE WEST IN TIIE EAST 

cise, a sickening form of idolatry when it is the 
mere stringing together of beatific phrases, and 
when it is a frenzied tearing off of the spiritual 
garments, an aw^ful exposure, more curious than 
helpful. All this phase of the matter is even more 
apparent to the Oriental than to us, and to them 
it is more disconcerting. The number and the 
class of the Christian converts in India prove 
this. They are practically all of the lowest class, 
for whom the bait of food, in time of famine, 
and protection, have been the main temptations 
to conversion. 

But besides the Hindus and the Christians, 
and some one hundred thousand Parsis in India, 
there are the Jains, a sect which exaggerates 
some of the Buddhist doctrines, as, for example, 
the extreme concern for animal life, bodily pen- 
ance as a necessity for salvation, and so on. 
These people maintain hospitals for useless ani- 
mals who would otherwise be killed. I have 
seen two of these compounds, crowded with 
camels, bullocks, cows, water-buffaloes, dogs, 
cats, chickens, pigeons, and so on, all kept 
alive by this fanatical charity which holds it 
wrong to kill a fly, or vermin, even when on the 
person. 

There are the Sikhs, a sect of Hindus who 
recognize no distinctions of caste, worship the 



RELIGION AND CASTE 233 

Granth, or holy book, have thek own teachers 
or gurus, and who were at one time, and even as 
late as the middle of the eighteenth century, a 
formidable military power. 

There are the Marathas, who grew from a 
military organization of local Hindu tribes in 
southern India, into the most formidable mili- 
tary and political power in India at the time of 
the break-up of the Mughal empire, in the begin- 
ning of the eighteenth century. 

There are the Muhammadans (they, again, 
divided into two sects of Shiahs and Sunnis), 
who began their invasions of India about 1000 
A. D., and who now number sixty-two mill- 
ions, or about one-fifth of the total population. 
There are, besides these, numerous tribes, some 
of them almost extinct, who are practically sav- 
age relics of the aborigines and their Animistic 
worship. 

The differences between these various sects 
and tribes and religions before the British came, 
were not merely the epicene pulpit quarrels, such 
as mark our Western theological polemics, mat- 
ters that do not interfere with inter-dining and 
dancing, but matters of life and death. Mon- 
tesquieu writes: "Apres tout, c'est mettre ses con- 
jectures a bien haut prix, que d'en faire cuire 
un homme tout vif." But these people did not 



234 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

hesitate to clothe their beliefs with full sanction 
to use both fire and sword. So far as one can see, 
the vitality of these main beliefs is unimpaired, 
and the pilgrimages to Mecca, to Rangoon, and 
to Benares show no lessening of numbers nor of 
enthusiasm. 

If one is to see anything in Benares except 
a diversely colored peripatetic laundry on an 
enormous scale, one must have some such thread 
of knowledge upon which to string one's impres- 
sions. How can there be any such thing as na- 
tional or patriotic feeling in India as a whole! 
The people of Bombay, of Bengal, of Peshawar, 
of Madras, of the Punjab can only slowly grow 
to feel that they belong to one great Indian na- 
tion. Their speech even is so different that the 
man in Madras can no more understand the man 
from the Punjab than the Spaniard can under- 
stand the Russian. 

Not only the differences are great, as between 
a low-class Hindu propitiating demons and wor- 
shipping trees, plants, stones, rivers, water-tanks, 
cows, crocodiles, peacocks, all held to be sa- 
cred in certain parts of India, and the high-class 
members of the two reformed bodies, the Arya 
Somaj and the Brahma Somaj, who reject all 
idol- worship, and have refined the Hindu relig- 
ious philosophy to the point of radical Unitarian- 



RELIGION AND CASTE 235 

ism ; but the numbers are enormous. There are 
over 200,000,000 Hindus, more than 60,000,000 
Muhammadans, more than 9,000,000 Buddhists, 
nearly 9,000,000 Animists, besides Sikhs, Jains, 
Parsis, and a sprinkling of Jews and Christians. 

It is estimated that there are 1,544,510,000 
people in the world. Of these 175,290,000 are 
Muhammadans, 300,000,000 are Confucians, 
214,000,000 are Brahmans, 121,000,000 Buddh- 
ists, 534,940,000 are Christians, 10,860,000 are 
Jews, and other bodies of lesser numbers. The 
number of Christians given by the German 
statistician I quote is, I believe, exaggerated. 
Where can he count so many.^ 

More than half the people in the world live in 
India and China, and these figures give one some 
notion of the colossal loaf of paganism that it is 
the ambition of the missionary to leaven. These 
figures, too, tell the tale of the bathing, praying 
thousands on the banks of the river Ganges at 
Benares, but they give the reader, also, I hope, 
some idea of the terrifying proportions of the 
problem of the British ruler in India. 

He is not only dealing in India with these un- 
known, and almost incomprehensible, diversities 
of creed, and custom, and ancient precedent, but 
also with the problem common to all of us every- 
where, of the political status of the individual. 



236 THE \NEST IN THE EAST 

of his rights, and of the quality and quantity of 
his participation in legislation. 

No Oriental nation will hear that women have 
been given a vote, and thereby a voice in how 
they shall be governed, without a vocal and phys- 
ical protest such as no mutiny even can parallel. 

Great Britain is being assaulted just now by 
women demanding the suffrage. What will hap- 
pen among Hindus and Muhammadans, with 
their notions of the position of women, should 
women be given the vote, is rather beyond or- 
dinary imaginative powers. Orientals are all 
born and bred aristocrats. It is the Indians 
who visit England, and who discover how un- 
Brahman are many of their rulers there, who 
return to spread the seeds of discontent even now. 
The Oriental, of all others, knows the folly of 
the rights of man. 

Rousseau begins his Contrat Social: "L'hom- 
me ne libre, est partout dans les fers." The 
profound error here, but one that has unduly ex- 
cited the world, is that man is not born free, he 
is, on the contrary, born in chains. He begins 
life in chains, chains of parentage, of inheritance, 
of environment, of capability, of disposition, of 
looks, of strength, physical and moral. All dis- 
cussions of liberty are founded upon this gross 
error. Some men achieve a certain liberty, but 



RELIGION AND CASTE 237 

they are all, everywhere, bom to slavery! No 
political philosopher of the West knows as well 
as does the Oriental that it is the weak who are 
always screaming for liberty, while the strong 
are forever asking for more strength and courage 
to bear the responsibilities that liberty has put 
upon them, not the least of which is the protect- 
tion of the weak, by assuming the right to rule. 
In these days, indeed, it is very much to be 
doubted whether the weak are more burdened 
by the chains of subordination than are the strong 
by the chains of responsibility. 

It is an enlightening commentary upon the dif- 
ficulties to be met in the evolution of the free- 
dom of the individual, to read the report of the 
Society of Comparative Legislation upon the 
legislation of the British Empire. For the ten 
years ending in 1907 twenty-five thousand new 
laws were made by men for the restriction of 
their own liberties in the British Empire ! First, 
men strike off the chains of the church, of feud- 
alism, of autocracy which bind them, and then 
with a new system, with self-government, in a 
new era, they are finding that the new liberties 
must have new masters, and they turn to laws 
for their masters. 

The variety of problems and peoples in the 
British Empire is shown by the variety of sub- 



238 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

jects dealt with by these laws. There are laws 
punishing w^itchcraft and widow-burning; there 
are laws about animals, and even about inani- 
mate objects, as in Athens, where if a tree fell 
on a man and killed him the tree was solemnly 
tried and outlawed. 

This glut of law-making is by no means eon- 
fined to the British Empire. We in America 
have many and ludicrous examples of it. The 
horse breaks his harness and is free, free to 
cut himself to pieces running through the 
crowded streets. The lion breaks out of his 
cage and cowers in a corner, bewildered by his 
freedom. Men break away from one tyranny, 
only to harness themselves in a mesh of knots 
and buckles more hampering than before. 

The intelligence, the experience, and the wis- 
dom of the world have no wish to enslave or to 
hamper individual liberty. Certainly we Ameri- 
cans have no such ambition, nor have the Brit- 
ish, but just to take the harness off the horse does 
not solve the problem. Germany and Japan are 
ominous examples of how happy is the horse, and 
how well he goes when harnessed, handled, and 
housed by one coachman in supreme control. 

We cannot be sure that we are not cutting 
away at individual initiative, at independence, at 
personal prowess and courage, by this weaving 



RELIGION AND CASTE 239 

a web of laws around the individual, even though 
they be supposedly for his protection and well- 
being. It may be that he is better off, after all, 
with a master, rather than with all as masters. 
This much, at least, must be said for those who 
hesitate, and counsel delay rather than haste, 
when dealing with India, and Egypt, and the 
Philippines. Democracy's cocksureness may 
land us all scrambling at the feet of a dictator. 
Liberty is a far more complicated problem to deal 
with than tyranny, and few there are who recog- 
nize it. Those who read these scanty sketches of 
the history, and of the domestic, religious, and 
social problems of India, will, I hope, share with 
me the feeling that a nation with such a gigantic 
problem to solve, should be judged and criti- 
cised with extreme care, and always with a lean- 
ing toward leniency ; and that we Americans, with 
our increasing responsibilities, both at home and 
abroad, in the governing of the colored races, 
should be the last to criticise ignorantly, or to 
counsel others to walk, or to walk ourselves, un- 
warily. 



VI 

HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 

INDIA is governed by the British, but only 
part of it is governed directly by them. Of 
the 1,766,642 square miles of India, 690,000 
square miles are under the rule of the native 
princes, as are 66,000,000 out of the 300,000,000 
inhabitants. There are some 6,000 native chiefs, 
big and little, from the Nizam, the ruler of Hyder- 
abad, with its population of 11,000,000, its terri- 
tory of 82,698 square miles, and its revenues of 
$12,000,000, doTNTi to a petty chief with a few 
square miles of territory, and a few thousands a 
year of revenue. 

There is as much variety in their breeding, and 
bearing, and ability as in their territories and reve- 
nues. Some of them trace their ancestry straight 
back to the first conquerors from the north ; oth- 
ers are descended from Arab, Tartar, or Afghan 
invaders; others are the descendants of court 
favorites, and their ancestral right to rank is as 
illegitimate as some of the proud names in Eng- 
land and France; while others are heirs of rough 

210 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 241 

soldiers who grabbed what they could and held 
it when the Mughal Empire went to pieces. Some 
are highly educated, others ignorant; some are 
Anglicized, some Pariscized, devoting much time, 
those to cricket, racing, polo; and these to such 
European travel as they are permitted, and lazy 
licentiousness both at home and abroad. There 
are fine gentlemen among them, as chivalrous 
and as proud as any noble in Europe, and there 
are others who are mere naughty school-boys. 
There are not a few who spend their money on 
schools and colleges and museums, on irriga- 
tion works and tramways, on roads and bridges 
and model prisons, and who pride themselves 
on the efficiency and smartness of their Imperial 
Service troops; and others who throw thousands 
about on motor-cars, jewels, dancing-girls, or 
favorite wives, and hideous Brummagem fur- 
niture and pictures. There are burly, heavy- 
shouldered, big-hipped, gross-featured princes, 
who look like brown caricatures of some of 
Rubens's women; and there are lithe, muscular, 
fine-featured fellows, who look fit for a tussle with 
a tiger, and show their breeding even to their 
finger-tips. 

"The control which the supreme government 
exercises over the native states varies in degree; 
but they are all governed by the native princes. 



242 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ministers, or councils with the help and under the 
advice of a resident or agent, in political charge 
either of a single state or a group of states. The 
chiefs have no right to make war or peace, or to 
send ambassadors to each other or to external 
states ; they are not permitted to maintain a mil- 
itary force above a certain specified limit; no 
European is allowed to reside at any of their 
courts without special sanction ; and the supreme 
government can exercise any degree of control 
in case of misgovemment. Within these limits 
the more important chiefs are autonomous in 
their own territories. Some, but not all of them, 
are required to pay an annual fixed tribute." 

It can be no easy task to govern these semi- 
independent princes ; not to hurt their pride ; not 
to offend their sensibilities, for they are very 
touchy people indeed ; not to restrict their liberty 
too much and yet to keep the less self-respecting 
among them within bounds; not to interfere in 
social and religious matters, or between them and 
their subjects and neighbors, and yet to exert a 
constant influence for rational government; to 
shoot and ride and play games with them, and 
yet to keep well aloof from familiarity; to keep 
constantly informed of their doings at home and 
abroad, and yet not to appear to pry, or to be 
suspicious; to be called upon for advice in the 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 243 

most delicate family affairs, as well as in matters 
of state, and to keep a detached mind and main- 
tain a just neutrality; this calls for a very unu- 
sual type of man. 

I wish I were not debarred by my own rule 
of not mentioning names, from giving here and 
now a picture of one of my English hosts, who 
is an ideal servant of his country, in a position of 
this kind. He is the resident or political agent 
who has under his supervision a number of the 
native princes, one or two of them of great im- 
portance, and it was my good fortune to be his 
guest, when, by reason of a meeting of the chiefs, 
I saw him in personal contact with them. It 
was a revelation of what one quiet man's influ- 
ence can do, and of the control that can be won, 
without apparent effort, by a man possessing the 
rare qualities I have described as necessary to 
cope with such a problem. I sometimes won- 
der if England knows the value of some of her 
servants out here. 

Many Englishmen, whose fate and fortune 
and empire, are dependent upon the success of 
their rule in India, seem to be interested in 
India as sympathetically and as intelligently as 
the Irishman in the funeral procession. The 
long line of carriages was obliged to halt at a 
certain street-crossing. A passer-by near one of 



244 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

the carriages asked an Irishman sitting inside 
whose funeral it was. ''Shure an' I dunno," 
was the reply, "I'm only in for the roide." 

However, my host and others like him are not 
looking for sympathy and not stopping to think 
often whether their work is appreciated or not, 
so long as the British Babus in Parliament do 
not interfere with them. They probably real- 
ize, as do all men who do the hard work of the 
world, that the ladder on which the angels de- 
scend is usually set up in a stony place, as it was 
in the time of Jacob. I have no brief for this 
civil service of the British in India, and my praise 
will probably never reach their ears, but I cannot 
forbear the expression of my admiration for 
some of the residents, political agents, judges, 
commissioners, and deputy commissioners I met 
and saw at work there. They are doing delicate, 
difficult, and dangerous work, with a coolness, 
devotion, and uprightness unequalled and unap- 
proached by anything I have ever seen else- 
where in the world, and withal without the 
slightest attempt to advertise themselves. If I 
were in such a position, I should be made cyni- 
cal, indeed, by some of the snap criticism from 
travellers and politicians, and from the Oxford 
and Cambridge Babus from England and else- 
where. 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 245 

We Westerners are not the sole progeny of 
light. Our civilization is only dawning, and big 
with possible disasters ; but some critics from the 
East assume that our social, political, and ethi- 
cal weights and measures have been tested and 
stamped with approval in heaven; and the more 
crude and unkempt the civilization they repre- 
sent, the more categorical are the prophets 
thereof. 

I was honored by invitations from about a 
dozen of the native princes, and the story of 
some of these visits it will be a pleasure to tell, 
and I regret that I have not space for all. 

The journey from Bombay to the native state 
of Baroda was our first experience of railway 
travel in India. The train was to leave a little 
before eight o'clock in the morning, and the rail- 
way station was at some distance away. The 
bearer with bullock-carts piled high with lug- 
gage got off before dawn. We had ordered cabs 
for the early start to the station, but when we 
appeared there were no conveyances of any kind, 
no knowledge on the part of any one at the hotel 
that we were to leave, or that cabs were wanted, 
and no inclination to solve the problem. It 
seemed to strike the hotel servants as prepos- 
terous that we should be excited, and determined 
to catch the train we had planned to go by. 



M6 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

We discovered after some months in India, 
that the Oriental way is to make a pilgrimage 
to the railway station, settle down quietly on the 
platform, or at some convenient place near by, 
cook, eat, bathe, enjoy the excitement of incom- 
ing and outgoing trains, not infrequently to try 
to bargain with the ticket-seller as to the price 
of tickets, on the assumption that by holding 
off for some hours they may be had cheaper, 
and thus to get away gradually somewhere 
within twenty-four hours of the time one ar- 
rives at the station. To pull out your watch, 
call a cab, and get to the train you intend to 
go by, and all within an hour, seems to them 
like rushing to the theatre to see the curtain go 
up, and then leaving. 

It may be impossible to hurry the East along 
large administrative lines, but it is a mistake to 
suppose that at a pinch the determined traveller 
with some power of imperative gesture, and a 
comprehensive vocabulary of the monosyllabic 
expletives which England has taught the mean- 
ing of to all the tribes of earth, cannot prick this 
inertia into obedient and rapid motion. At any 
rate I claim to have done so, not once but many 
times. The climate is ill adapted to sudden vio- 
lent expenditures of heat, whether in the form of 
rhetoric or gesticulation, and the consequent open- 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 247 

ing of the pores may lead to catching cold, but 
with a cholera-belt, without which no one should 
travel in these climates, this danger is largely 
minimized, and one may undertake to hurry the 
East, on a small scale, without undue risk. 

The cars, or carriages, in the Indian trains 
are divided into compartments for four persons 
with the seats facing the sides, and not the end 
of the train. We usually had one of these to 
ourselves, and with your folding-table and chair, 
spirit-lamp, supply of mineral water, and some 
food, I found the travelling very comfortable. 
At night these long seats are widened by draw- 
ing them out slightly, your bedding is put on 
them, and I have travelled many nights in this 
way, and in spite of stifling heat sometimes, and 
bitter cold sometimes, and the most amazingly 
penetrating powdery dust, our alkali plains, or 
Mexican dust are nothing in comparison, I must 
admit that there was little to grumble at. This 
is not the verdict of many travellers, I know, 
and though I believe a man ought to claim com- 
fort when it is his right, I may be, these days, 
rather an easy-going traveller whose experiences 
ought not to tempt the finical and the fussy to 
repeat them. 

When your belongings are all in the carriage, 
hat-boxes, helmet-cases, medicine-cases, gun- 



248 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

cases, bedding, table, chair, bags of all sorts and 
sizes, food and water, spirit-lamp and night- 
lantern, cameras, sticks and umbrellas, hold-alls, 
pillows, etc., etc., you feel prepared to go on, or 
stop, or to cope with any emergency. These 
various impedimenta accumulate gradually. If 
you deviate at all from the main lines of travel 
you discover that there is no sending out to buy 
a pen, or ink, or a chair, or a hot-water bottle, 
or medicine, or a white tie, or what not that you 
have forgotten; and not infrequently medicine, 
or hot- water, or a lantern, or towels makes the 
difference between discomfort, and even illness, 
and comfort. And moreover the man or woman 
who takes any risk of being ill in India, and it is 
a trying place, will be fully recompensed and 
severely punished. It is expected that you will 
travel in this caravan fashion. There are coo- 
lies innumerable everywhere, and the more you 
have the more autocratic and authoritative is 
your bearer, and the more consideration he re- 
ceives. 

When we were later the guests of His Highness 
the Maharana of Udaipur, I saw a number of 
tents pitched near the palace, and asked what 
they were. I was told that the daughter of the 
prince was visiting him, she being the wife of 
the Maharaja of Jodhpur whose capital was not 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 249 

very far away. For her ten days' visit to her 
father she was accompanied by a retinue of 
five hundred people! So although our carriage 
looked rather full when we entered it to start for 
Baroda, it was really a trifling supply of neces- 
sities compared with the usages of polite society 
in this land. In most of the carriages is a small 
compartment for native servants next to the first- 
class compartment and opening into it. As your 
bearer is not only servant but interpreter, who 
must be ever at hand to act as go-between when 
you want fruit or tea or water, and to ask ques- 
tions for you in regard to time-tables, tickets, 
eating-stations, and other matters incident to 
travel, it is recognized by the railway companies, 
as by everybody else in India, that he must be 
provided with accommodation close at hand. 
At the hotels he sleeps outside your door, when 
you visit he finds a place within reach of the 
noise of clapping hands, and as he has never 
known the luxury of chairs, beds, or tables, and 
would not know what to do with them if they 
were his, his choice of quarters is easy and means 
no hardship. 

The railway fares both for native servants 
and for the natives are cheap, and in this land 
of pilgrimages, these cheap train journeys are 
very popular. Here at any rate the rigidity of 



250 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

caste prejudices is softened, and one sees car- 
riage after carriage jammed full of men, women, 
and children, their bedding, their pots and pans, 
and all that is theirs, and the more that can crowd 
into one carriage the happier they seem to be. 
Many times I have seen carriages only half full 
while others were overcrowded, and I have asked 
if all the carriages were for the same destination, 
merely to satisfy myself that these people were 
really crowding themselves voluntarily. 

This question of the treatment of the natives 
in railway trains is often referred to, and many 
are the anecdotes one hears of the bad manners 
and roughness both of English travellers and 
English railway management. My experience of 
travel was comparatively limited, though I cov- 
ered between seven and eight thousand miles, 
and journeyed from end to end, and twice clean 
across India. Once or twice native gentlemen 
travelled in the same carriage, when I was alone, 
and I never saw any rudeness except on the part 
of the minor native railway officials to travellers 
of their own race. Once, sometime after mid- 
night, I saw an English officer pile out of his 
carriage in his pajamas and slippers and soundly 
berate a native official who was bullying a third- 
class native woman passenger. 

The manners and habits of even the better 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 251 

class Indians are not as ours, and one would 
naturally avoid travelling in the same carriage 
with them. It is to be remembered in this con- 
nection that it is of all tests the severest to travel 
together, and that the Englishman is both shy 
and selfish. Even in his own country, his recep- 
tion of a stranger who enters the railway carriage 
in which he has made himself comfortable is of 
the most frigid, the most erinaceous. On the 
whole I think he behaves better in India than 
at home, when he travels. All great travellers 
from Gulliver to Cook prefer to travel alone. 

We arrived at Baroda in the early evening. 
Late in the afternoon as I was looking out I saw 
a picture that many times since I have regretted 
that I could not imprison with brush or pencil and 
keep, as typical of East and West. On the roof 
of a lightly built staging in the middle of a dis- 
tant field, where she was standing no doubt to 
keep the birds from the grain, stood a woman 
draped in her deep red sari^ one hand on her 
hip, the other shading her eyes as she watched 
the passing train. The sun was setting, the 
glow of the sky behind her made her stand out 
like a statue, and I wondered what she thought; 
whether she liked it, hated it, feared it, de- 
spised it, longed to be in it, or wished it away. 
When the interpreter comes who can make that 



252 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

statue of India talk, we shall know many things 
that no one has told us. 

When we left our carriage at the station at 
Baroda, we were instantly swallowed up in a 
pushing, haggling, gesticulating mass of brown 
arms and legs, with turbans bouncing about on 
top of them, whom our bearer dealt with as 
though they were troublesome insects; shortly 
there was silence and order, and several emis- 
saries from His Highness the Maharaja Gaekwar 
of Baroda greeted us on his behalf, showed us to 
our carriage, and we were driven away; later a 
procession of bullock-carts followed with the 
luggage, Heera Tall making himself felt as was 
his wont when our importance and our comfort 
were to be explained, no doubt with help from 
his imagination, to those who were to serve us. 

We all have our idiosyncrasies as guests no 
doubt. Personally I care very little what kind 
of a bed I am given because I can sleep anywhere 
and on almost anything; I have more than once 
nodded in a dentist's chair and on horseback; 
but an open fire in my room delights me, a good 
tub and plenty of water and towels, a well- 
furnished writing-table, these seem to me indis- 
pensable; and if in addition I find a book or two 
worth reading that I have not read, my happiness 
is complete and I consider my host an accom- 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 253 

plished provider. But these are trifles to your 
Oriental host. He takes you from the station in 
a carriage with two turbaned servants on the box 
and two standing on the foot-board behind; he 
puts a whole house at your disposal with a stew- 
ard and a staff of servants; you have but to order 
your carriage or a saddle-horse when they are 
wanted; and one of your host's own officers or 
secretaries is at your beck and call as guide and 
interpreter. He does not take you to the play, 
but he sends his whole troop of musicians and 
singers and dancing-girls to give you an enter- 
tainment in your own drawing-room; he orders 
his athletes and wrestlers, and there were a score 
or more of them, to perform for you alone; 
temples, palaces, schools, hospitals, are open 
and ready for you to inspect; his army is called 
out for you to review; his cheetahs and an army 
of beaters are there to give you a day's hunting 
of the deer; his elephants, his wonderful white 
bullocks, his stable of horses, all these are at 
your disposal. If you are interested in any or all 
of these things, he is the more delighted to have 
you for a guest, and the more willing to show you 
everything, and the more eager that you should 
prolong your visit. What puzzles him and those 
about him is that you should have fixed dates 
for other visits, that you should consider time 



254 THE \VEST IN THE EAST 

as a factor, permit time to tyrannize over your 
inclinations. WTiy not stay on a month with 
him, and let these other matters regulate and 
adjust themselves ? This is a much to be de- 
sired characteristic in a host to be sure, but one 
sometimes wonders if it does not prove an awk- 
ward thing when matters of business, of diplo- 
macy, of administration are to the fore. 

The Maharaja of Baroda, or to give him his 
official title. His Highness Maharaja Sir Sayaji 
Rao Gaekwar of Baroda, G. C. S. I., governs a 
State of some eight thousand five hundred square 
miles, an area slightly larger than Massachusetts, 
with a population of tw^o millions, and revenues 
of something over four million dollars. My first 
meeting with him in his summer palace revealed 
a man about five feet six in height, heavily built, 
but light on his feet and graceful of movement, 
and dressed in fine white muslin. He speaks 
both English and French, has been twice around 
the world, knows Europe and the United States 
w^ell, and is educating his sons, one in England, 
and one at Harvard University. He is, or as- 
sumed that mental attitude for my benefit, a 
frank admirer of American institutions and the 
American people, and hinted guardedly that if 
ever a change came in the government of India 
it might be somewhat along American lines, of 



HIS HIGHNESS THE IVIAHARAJA 255 

a federation of states under a central govern- 
ment. 

He is inclined to believe, as do practically all 
the educated and intelligent Indians, that the ex- 
clusive, aloof, and unsympathetic attitude of the 
British is responsible for the strained relations, so 
far as they are strained, claiming that distrust 
breeds distrust. Of his own reforms, and no 
native prince in India has attempted more in- 
telligently and persistently to better the condi- 
tion of his people, he said that they were dis- 
liked by his people largely through ignorance, 
and that once they were understood they were 
appreciated. He said, and profound and true 
it is, that an autocrat was possible and permissi- 
ble so long as the people were left largely to them- 
selves, and to their own social and political de- 
vices; but that once you introduced social re- 
forms, interfered in their daily lives, tried to 
change their customs, insisted upon attendance 
at school, vaccination, hygienic regulations, en- 
tered, in short, upon a detailed regulation of their 
intercourse with one another and the outside 
world, then autocracy was unbearable and im- 
possible, and that the people must be given a 
voice in their own government, when their imme- 
diate and personal concerns were thus investigated 
and dealt with. 



^56 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

He spoke freely of the ignorance of the people 
he governed, and said that even his own relatives 
disapproved of his travelling and of his eating 
with strangers. He admitted, owing to religious 
views, daily habits of eating, drinking, and bath- 
ing, the fine web of custom and tradition which 
holds the Hindus in its meshes every hour of 
the day, that intercourse and sympathy with 
foreigners was not easy. He thought political 
autonomy to be a long way off, but again re- 
verted to an expression of the feeling, that prog- 
ress might be faster if the British were more 
sympathetic, more trusting. 

That is always the master thought, the irri- 
tant factor, the beginning and the end of all the 
scores of conversations I have had with the^edu- 
cated Indians, this criticism of the cold, stolid 
self-sufficiency of the British. The Indians do 
not realize that they are not alone in this feeling, 
that Frenchmen, Germans, Irishmen, Ameri- 
cans all say the same, that it is the major defect 
of their great qualities. One can hardly expect 
the Oriental to hold the balance true in these 
matters when so few of the Occidental critics 
have been able to do so. Few of us are big 
enough to judge others by their superiorities 
rather than by their weaknesses and littlenesses. 
Poke fun at the weaknesses if you like, that is 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 257 

the salt of life, that sense that we are all of us, 
even the best of us, slightly ridiculous when 
looked at in certain lights, but never forget that 
it is the power that drives the engine that counts, 
not the smoke from the escape-pipe. Most crit- 
icism seems to devote itself to the bad smells at 
the mouth of the vent-pipe, hence its slight value. 
"They but rub the sore, when they should bring 
the plaster." 

Our days were full at Baroda. The Aide as- 
signed to us turned out to be a Brahman gentle- 
man recently returned from the United States, 
where he had been the companion of the young 
prince; and his English speech, and courteous 
manners and intelligence, smoothed the way for 
my ardent curiosity, which began with a review 
of the Baroda army on horseback at half-past 
five o'clock in the morning, and continued 
through the day with visits to schools, libraries, 
hospitals, wrestling-schools, elephant stables, 
armories, state jewels, and ended at eleven at 
night, with a performance in our drawing-room 
by His Highness's musicians and dancing-girls. 

In the guide-book under the heading Baroda 
it reads: "Good refreshment and waiting-rooms 
and sleeping accommodation." These words, 
and my experience in Baroda, mark emphati- 
cally the difference between seeing India as a 
tourist and seeing India as a guest. 



258 THE AVEST IN THE EAST 

Baroda is policed and lighted, the streets are 
watered, there is a good supply of water brought 
into this city, which has a population of over 
one hundred thousand, from a lake eighteen 
miles away, the schools are well attended, the 
hospitals clean, and the jail governed in most 
humane fashion, the prisoners being all kept at 
work at carpet, or rug, or basket, or rope making. 
I visited a model farm where experiments are 
being made in cotton growing, tobacco grow- 
ing, breeding of silk-worms, and where I saw a 
guava orchard, and English vegetables, cabbage, 
cauliflower, and tomatoes growing. 

Next to my gallop with Captain Pathak's cav- 
alry, the visit to a native village at some distance 
from Baroda gave me as much pleasure as any- 
thing. Part of the way we went in a carriage, 
and the last part of the way over the rougher 
roads, in a bullock-cart drawn by a pair of the 
famous white bullocks. We were greeted on 
our arrival by the whole village, with the im- 
portant men at their head. They conducted 
me to a covered-in space with a table and chair, 
and the fathers of the village sat cross-legged 
on the floor in front of me. The head men of 
these villages are often office-holders by heredity ; 
in this particular case no one could remember 
when a representative of this man's family had 
not been head man. The village seemed to be 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 259 

governed by seven, three appointed by the gov- 
ernment, three elected, and the head man. 
There was a town clerk who explained to me 
the method of election, the way the accounts 
were kept, and so on. 

It should be recalled to the reader in this 
connection that in India, with few commercial 
towns and a huge agricultural population, self- 
government was highly developed in these vil- 
lages centuries ago. The kings or emperors had 
absolute power in the empire, but they left the 
villages with a free hand to govern themselves. 
The Indians of those days enjoyed more civic 
rights, more control over their village affairs, 
than did the villagers of Europe, who in many 
places were little better than serfs. When Brit- 
ish rule came, with its strong central govern- 
ment, village government naturally declined. 
The villagers became less interested in the po- 
lice, schools, charities, roads, wells, tanks, small 
civil and criminal cases, and learned to lean upon 
the central government. 

In Baroda, the Gaekwar is attempting to make 
the villagers more interested in their own afifairs, 
and is putting more and more the control of 
small concerns in their hands. Compulsory 
education, among other things, had been intro- 
duced, and I asked the assembly in front of me 



260 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

their opinion about it; with the exception of two 
elders who seemed unenthusiastic, the others 
thought it wise. When I arose to go out, to walk 
about in the village, wreaths of flowers were 
hung about my neck, two bouquets were pre- 
sented to me, and I was given betal leaf and 
cardamon seed, w^hich are not bad chewing, by 
the way. 

I visited the boys' school and the girls' school, 
and in both places they were drawn up in line 
to sing to me. I was allow^ed to enter two or 
three dwellings, rough square mud huts they 
were, with cows, chickens, ducks walking about 
in the compound, and all with cakes of cow-dung 
drying on the walls and on the ground, this 
being their fuel, and consequently a robbery of 
the land of its natural fertilizer ; but there seems 
to be no remedy for this in a land of no natural 
fuel. 

At the well, which seems to be a sort of vil- 
lage meeting-place, like the railway station at 
train-time, or a popular corner grocery in a small 
New England town, or the Indian trader's store 
on one of our Indian reservations, the women 
were coming and going, filling their earthen or 
brass or bell-metal jars. Each one lets down the 
rope, each one draws it up, fills her receptacle, 
and walks awav balancino^ her burden on her 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 261 

head. It is a picturesque sight, these scenes at 
the wells in India, whether it be these face-con- 
cealing women with their statuesque poses, or 
the men with a pair of oxen letting down and 
drawing up the great leather bag and droning 
their song, as the oxen pull the rope up and the 
bag is emptied into the narrow channels, which 
serve as tiny viaducts through the fields. 

I have watched these people at the wells in 
India by the hour; these people and the soldiers 
are the people you like, feel sorry for perhaps, 
until you discover that they do not feel sorry for 
themselves ; then you realize that you are pump- 
ing up the fantastic sympathies of the West 
which are not binding here at all, and all too 
often artificial even at home, a way of making 
the child cry by so much sympathy over his small 
bruise that he begins to think it important him- 
self. What a lot of that there is, and how the 
demagogues of our Western world are making 
the children cry over hurts that they did not 
even know were painful, until the political boss 
discovered that they have a vote value, and the 
advertising philanthropist discovered what good 
posters they make! 

If appearances count for anything, I have 
never seen happier people than some of the 
Gliurka and Sikh soldiers, and the people in 



262 THE AVEST IN THE EAST 

many of the villages in India. Life is hard, to 
be sure, but life everywhere is hard, if it is not 
soft, and as for that, I have never seen people 
anywhere so unhappy, so little to be envied, as 
those who belong to the soft tribe, whether in 
India or in New York. I left this little village 
of Gora with garlands of flowers around my 
neck, with bouquets in my hands, my mouth 
full of seeds, attempting to reply to the many 
and profound salaams with the courtesy and 
dignity they merited. 

Another day we were shown His Highness's 
jewels. One diamond, a pendant to the great 
necklace, is the sixth largest in the world, and 
at one time belonged to Napoleon III. There 
are three pearls said to be valued at one hun- 
dred thousand dollars and a pearl necklace well 
known all over the world to those interested in 
precious stones. These were merely the choicest 
things in a collection comprising sapphires, em- 
eralds, rubies, and other jewels. There were 
inlaid sword and dagger hilts, and scabbards 
incrusted with precious stones, aigrettes that 
were showers of diamonds, and richly embroi- 
dered coats and mantles. 

At the stables we saw the gold and silver gun- 
carriages and cannon, which contain each two 
hundred and eighty pounds of gold, and which 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 2G3 

are drawn on state occasions by white bullocks, 
each of which had its own covering embroidered 
with gold and silver, and even silver cases for 
their horns. 

India has ever hoarded wealth in this form. 
In a land where securities are unknown, where 
wealth must be easily portable, where there are 
no savings-banks and trust companies, the old 
methods still survive and prevail, and not one 
but many of these princes, and other rich men in 
India still count their w^ealth as most secure 
when it is in precious stones, jewelry, and bul- 
lion. Even the poor carry in their ears and noses, 
on their fingers, toes, arms, and legs, and around 
their necks and waists, practically all they pos- 
sess of any marketable value. What else can 
they do, in a country w^here there are no doors 
to the houses, and no locks and keys, and where 
a brass toe-stud, a gun-metal nose-ring, or a thin 
silver anklet represent months of saving, and 
taken all together comprise the total wealth of 
the family. The princes merely do in a big way 
what the peasants do in a small w^ay. 

Another day w^as devoted to the college, high- 
school, and primary schools, with their dormi- 
tories, library of thousands of volumes, play- 
grounds, and class-rooms ; and to what interested 
me very much, a so-called national school. This 



THE WEST IN THE EAST 

school had some sixty boys who were bemg 
brought up quite apart from the state system and 
without state aid. The boys live at the school, 
and their teachers are patriotic volunteers who 
devote themselves to this work for little or no 
recompense. The idea is to bring up the boys in 
their own religion, in their own traditions, and to 
make and keep them Indian. They are taught 
swimming, wrestling, club-swinging, and other 
ancient forms of exercise, some of which I saw 
in practice. A curious ascetic idealism forms 
part of their working creed. They have their 
own temple, study their ow^n literature, and are 
taught their own history. The head of this 
establishment was a gentle-spoken, highly edu- 
cated enthusiast, who would have these Indian 
youths prepared to work as missionaries to keep 
India, India; and the Indians, Indians, instead 
of brown Britishers with bowler-hats, bad man- 
ners, a tincture of Western knowledge, and hy- 
brid patriotism. It was pathetic, but no man 
who loves his own can help lending a little love 
to the fellow who loves his. It struck me as a 
forlorn hope, but I sent a small subscription 
when I left. There was no greed, no gain, no 
personal ambition in it. Here was a John the 
Baptist out in this wilderness, with little more 
to work with than he had, and a dream of con- 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 265 

verting three hundred milUons to piety and pa- 
triotism; who could avoid lending a hand! 

Some miles away geographically, but latitudes 
away spiritually, was His Highness's wrestling 
school. There I found a group of athletes that 
opened my eyes to the possibilities of muscular 
development in this climate. The Indians as 
a whole, except in the north-west, are physically 
a feeble folk, whose working days are over at 
fifty, and whose women are haggard and un- 
lovely at thirty. These wrestlers went through 
their exercises for me, and to my surprise I found 
the medicine-ball, the sparring-bag, the Indian- 
clubs, and the catch-as-catch-can bouts of wrest- 
ling of my youth. They also showed me wrest- 
ling in the Japanese fashion, with the leg and 
arm-breaking holds that we associate with the 
Japanese but which, I was assured, w^ere as old 
as Buddhism, and must therefore have filtered 
into Japan by way of China, Burma, and Korea. 
When these wrestlers lined up that I might photo- 
graph them, I thought how an American foot- 
ball coach's mouth would water at the sight of 
such material. If I was surprised, they were 
surprised too that I could swing clubs, play with 
the medicine-ball, and enjoy a bout of wrestling. 
How colossally ignorant we all are of one an- 
other! 



266 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

No other town in India, I believe, has a learned 
Indian musician, with an English degree in music, 
who conducts a school of native music and de- 
votes himself entirely to a revival of the old in- 
struments and the old music. Baroda is thus fort- 
unate. As a result the musical instruments, and 
the music and singing at the entertainment given 
for us, were classic. I admit that the music it- 
self gave me little pleasure, though one feature 
made me see what I had never seen before. An 
old, gray-bearded man, accompanied by three 
or four instruments, including a small drum, re- 
cited a long tale with sobs and shrieks and vio- 
lent gestures. There and then I am sure I saw 
the bard of Greece. Thus were handed down 
the tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and this 
particular old man was capable of going on for 
hours without a break and without hesitation. 
But when you have reviewed cavalry at 5.30 
A. M. even a Greek bard telling of Achilles is 
wearisome after three-quarters of an hour, and 
the listener has been out of bed seventeen hours. 
Even at more ambitious performances I have 
regretted, that the author or translator of Psalm 
XCV has made it appear, that "singing," and 
"making a joyful noise," are equally pleasing. 

Following the music the dancing-girls, one of 
them both in face and figure beautiful, gave two 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 267 

or three short dances and one long one, the last 
being the story of two children kite-flying, a very 
popular sport all through the East; one loses her 
kite, is in despair; it is recaptured, and so on. 
It is a graceful form of pantomime, and might 
be given before a Sunday-school. Strange to 
say, in these Eastern lands, where nakedness, 
or partial nakedness, are universal, the theatri- \^^ 
cal and terpsichorean performers are clothed 
from neck to heel. I have seen much dancing 
in India, Korea, and Japan, but it is always the 
same as to propriety. Such lascivious and sug- 
gestive performances as are given, are for the 
benefit of the puritan-bred libertine, whose diet 
demands more brutal revelations for its satis- 
faction. I suppose it is largely a question of 
rice and red meat, and it would be interesting 
in this connection to have trustworthy statistics 
as to vegetarian morals. 

We were honored one afternoon before we 
left by an audience with Her Highness, the Ma- 
harani, the wife of the Gaekwar. She was the 
most beautiful woman I saw in India, and talked 
to us of her children and their education in Eng- 
land and in America, and broke the rule of re- 
ceiving men in her palace when she learned that 
I had been at Harvard. She was much inter- 
ested in the local schools and hospitals, and the 



268 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

reforms of her husband, and seemed to be, in 
spite of her soft eyes and gentle speech, a master- 
ful person with a mind of her own, and far, far 
away, from the type of secluded, uneducated 
women which is the rule in India. The surprise 
of her visit to America had been our women. 
She thought them bold and noisy and lacking 
in gentleness. Even her evident leaning toward 
our many other radical departures in politics 
and in society did not pardon, in her estimation, 
what seemed to her the vulgar shrillness and 
ostentatious independence of our wives and 
daughters. As we were leaving she showed me 
a mounted tiger she had shot. When I expressed 
my admiration, perhaps with a little surprise, she 
said: "Oh, you think we Hindu women cannot 
be sportsmen!" I knew better than that. He 
who knows anything of Indian history know s that 
India has had her Joan of Arc, not once, but 
many times, and that the Indian women have 
sacrificed themselves, not in twos and threes, but 
in hecatombs, for their country. 

His Highness' s Aide, who was unwearying 
in his intelligent attentions, and who even pre- 
pared us a dinner with his ow^n hands, such as a 
Brahman might eat, and sent it over to our bun- 
galow, was a type of Indian very puzzling to deal 
with, I should think. He was a man of strong 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 269 

religious feeling and high ideals, far more thor- 
oughly educated than the average Englishman or 
American of his years, and revealing what I had 
not seen before, but what I saw often before I 
left India, a sort of yearning for sympathy for 
his own case and that of his people. He too 
noted the lack of sympathy with, and the lack of 
recognition of, the best class of natives; the re- 
fusal of office either civil or military above a cer- 
tain grade; the smaller salary paid to the Indian 
than to the Englishman holding the same office, 
all of which created a sore and sour feeling. He 
was only just returned from America, and the 
contrasts leave the shadows of sadness upon him 
thicker than they are upon other men. 

He was, as are all the Indians of his type, mod- 
erate in manner, soft of speech, gentle even in in- 
dignation. They are pathetic figures, cut oif from 
opportunity , with no exercise for their real powers, 
and feeling that they are only allowed to play 
at life, that the real control is in alien hands, and 
they chafe at the situation. He was much 
amused at the ignorance of India he met with 
in America. He mentioned the parochial or- 
thodoxy which looked upon him as a heathen 
and as a worshipper of idols. The difference be- 
tween an educated Brahman and a Hindu peas- 
ant, he said, was as great in religious matters as 
the difference between the Unitarianism of Chan- 



270 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ning and the Catholicism of a Spanish peasant, 
and yet both claim to be Christians! 

It is Sunday. Two green lizards dart back and 
forth on the wall before me. On a tree outside 
the window a monkey is watching me with inter- 
est and with occasional gestures and waggings of 
the head, that might easily be interpreted as indi- 
cating contempt for my sedentary occupation, 
and an invitation to join him in his brisker and 
healthier arboreal athletics. What a difference 
between us : I am wondering if my ancestors had 
tails, while he is enjoying his. My thoughts are 
far away from Baroda, and the lizards and the 
monkey. 

I see John P. Shorter, who is, let us say, a 
stove and hardware merchant in Kansas City. 
He has breakfasted on fried beefsteak, fried po- 
tatoes, hot bread and coffee, and also fish-balls, 
for his wife has a strain of the Brahman blood of 
New England in her veins. He has on his un- 
comfortable Sunday clothes. His wife is over- 
dressed, and wears a hat which has cost a dis- 
proportionate amount of the monthly income. 
The children look stiffened and starched. Their 
clothes and their food, and what will be thrown 
away of the latter by the Irish servant-girl, repre- 
sent the revenue of a whole Indian village for a 
month. They are grumbling at the high cost of 
living, and John P. mitigates the cost of his wife's 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 271 

hat by denouncing the Trusts. They go to church, 
where John P. has a pew in the centre aisle. A 
small silver-plated name-plate, with "John P. 
Shorter" on it, marks his possession of a pew in 
the sanctuary. He knows everybody, everybody 
knows him. There are few or no strangers, and 
all belong to much the same social stratum as at 
a club. There are no poor or friendless or un- 
kempt persons present. They would be as out 
of place here, as the rabble off the street would 
be in the front ranks of a military parade. 

This Occidental arrangement for the w^orship 
of God, is financially and socially much the same 
arrangement as obtains at a theatre of the better 
class. It reminds one of the stranger who joined 
in the anthem at a service at Magdalen College, 
Oxford. The verger promptly spoke to him and 
told him he was not to sing. "This is the house 
of God," he replied, "and I am only joining in 
the worship." "House of God!" repeated the 
agitated verger. "House of God, sir!' AVhy, this 
is Magdalen Chapel!" Should John the Bap- 
tist appear at the portals of the Second Church 
of Christ in Kansas City, the sexton would be 
mortified. 

The Second Church is the result of a quarrel 
over who should be superintendent of the Sunday- 
school in the First Church, and the seceders now 



272 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

have a church of the same faith, but to them- 
selves. The separation has left both the congre- 
gations and the revenues of these two bodies, who 
worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, rather 
lean, but the religious rivalry adds piquancy to 
the social life of the town, and nobody is offended 
apparently, much less shocked, by this open rent 
in the garment of charity. 

This is Foreign Missions Sunday. John P. 
has given each of the children ten cents, and his 
wife fifty cents, and has provided himself, in a 
convenient pocket, with the amount which he 
considers his position in the church and in the 
community demands. 

Four strikingly and modishly dressed persons, 
two men and two women, in a gallery behind the 
pulpit, where their latest discoveries in collars, 
ties, hats, feathers, and blouses are ostentatiously 
and perhaps provocatively displayed, and who 
are paid handsome salaries to outdo a similar 
quartette in the First Church, and at the same 
time to voice John P.'s praise of God for him, 
arise, adjust themselves for the inspection of the 
audience, and strike up: 

"From Greenland's icy mountains 
From India's coral strand 



They call us to deliver 

Their land from error's chain.'* 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 273 

They go on to proclaim further, do these ladies 
in corsets, in open-work blouses, and wearing 
high heels, false curls and ear-rings, and gold in 
their teeth, that: 

"The heathen in his bhndness 
Bows down to wood and stone," 

and later ask with due emphasis the question : 

"Shall we whose souls are lighted 
By wisdom from on high, — 
Shall we to men benighted 
The lamp of life deny?" 

John P. rises, sets his glasses on his nose, and 
follows the words in his hymn-book. Mrs. John 
P. inspects the fashions in the choir and about 
her, and by a natural concatenation of thoughts 
drifts away to that alley-way in the Waldorf Ho- 
tel where she saw, on her one visit there, sartorial 
visions that have never been forgotten. After 
this full-throated invitation to Greenland, and to 
India, and to Ceylon, voiced mainly by the quar- 
tette of hirelings, to come into the fold and be like 
Mr. and Mrs. John P., the missionary pleader is 
presented to "my people" by *'our beloved pas- 
tor," whose salary, by the way, is two months in 
arrears. 

I may appear, way out here in Baroda, to that 
monkey in the tree to be looking at him, but I am 



274 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

not. I see that preacher as though I were seated 
in the Second Church in Kansas City. I hear 
his exaggerated accounts of the work done, and 
its ever-increasing success. I hear the anecdotes 
picked for the occasion, of misery and want, and 
a longing for better things a la John P. Shorter ; 
of the rich rulers ''bowing down to wood and 
stone," men of many wives and many pleasures, 
while the peasants are bowed down and bent, 
and burnt brown with the toil and heat. 

I have described something of the actual situa- 
tion here where I am a guest. Only yesterday 
afternoon I saw a Muhammadan standing at sun- 
set on a block of stone on which he had placed 
his carpet, in a busy street filled with Hindus 
coming and going, saying his prayers and making 
repeated obeisance toward Mecca. His religion 
is not only different, but antagonistic to the creed 
and the customs of the Hindus, but in Baroda the 
Gaekw^ar, a Hindu himself, imposes absolute re- 
ligious tolerance. I ask myself what would hap- 
pen if mass were said daily in the open street in 
Kansas City. 

The missionary in his frock-coat and white tie 
gets hotter and hotter in this furnace-heated at- 
mosphere — the furnace man is a negro. John 
P., despite his too heavy breakfast of fried beef, 
smiles benignly as he hears that the cow is sacred 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 275 

in India, and almost winks at the superintendent 
of the stock yards whose pew is across the aisle. 
Mrs. John P., somewhat anaemic, for the climate 
is trying in Kansas City, is glad she married 
John P., as she listens to the account of the posi- 
tion of women in India. As for me, I shiver to 
think what the consensus of the competent, 
granting even that they are a jury of Christians, 
would say if they w^ere called upon to decide 
between John P. and the Maharaja Gaekwar of 
Baroda. If there is any such heaven as John P. 
sings about, and hears preached about, when he 
gets there he will be surprised to find how bright 
is the halo, how tuneful the harp, and how el- 
evated the position of some of these heathen 
princes, for whose conversion he, John P. Shorter, 
of the Second Church of Christ, in Kansas City, 
has condescendingly contributed one dollar! 

I know of no place in the world so far away 
from New York as Udaipur. Udaipur is the cap- 
ital of the native State of Mewar, ruled over by 
His Highness, the Maharana Dhiraj Sir Fateh 
Singh, G. C. S. I., and has some twelve thousand 
square miles of territory, a population of a little 
more than one million, and revenues of about six 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Its ruler is 
the premier prince, and the proudest, in all India. 
His authentic ancestry reaches back two thou- 



276 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

sand years, and stretches on beyond that In 
Indian mythology, to the progenitor of the solar 
race, the deified hero Rama. This prince bears 
to the world of Hinduism a relation unique either 
in the East or the West. He is part Pope, part 
High Priest, part King. He may even interfere 
with Brahmanical excommunication ; and at his 
death, men who would die rather than submit 
to an insult to their beards, shave their faces 
clean. 

There Is no suspicion of representative govern- 
ment, no dreams even of the rights of man, no 
complications of electricity, or steam, or compul- 
sory education, no politics, no fantastic hygiene, 
no patent foods, no fear of microbes, no fashions 
or etiquette of a date later than 728 A. D., when 
the history of the present State under the present 
family began by the taking of the fortress of Chi- 
tor by Bappa; no newspapers, no news, except 
the lazy gossip of the bazaars; no hurry except 
when news is brought from one of the stations in 
the hills, where men are kept day and night the 
year round for this purpose, that a black panther 
or a tiger has been seen, then the Maharana and a 
retinue hasten away; no daily excitement about 
an earthquake in Japan, a revolution in Portugal, 
a change of government in England, a panic in 
New York, a strike in Paris, or a rhetorical out- 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA Til 

burst in Berlin ; no jealousy of other countries, no 
envy of progress elsewhere. Why should there 
be, since their ruler is little less than a god to hun- 
dreds of millions of Hindus, and to criticise his 
home, his habits, and his decrees is unthinkable. 
Therefore I repeat Udaipur is farther from the 
Bowery than any other place in the world. 

It was a happy accident of travel that our next 
visit after that to Baroda was to this prince, who 
will have nothing to do with modern inventions 
whether of mind or matter. 

We left the guest house at Baroda to take a 
train leaving at 5.18 a. m. The train was late and 
we drove back to wait. We returned to the sta- 
tion an hour and a half later; the train was still 
late, and we finally got away three hours and a 
half after getting out of bed, and twenty-nine 
hours of continuous railway travel brought us to 
Udaipur. This is one example, there were 
many, though I shall not cite them, which bids 
me again warn travellers who lack enthusiasm, a 
stout heart, and a strong constitution, and the 
best of introductions, that a visit to India may 
prove as disappointing to them as it was delight- 
ful to us. 

Udaipur is worth all the fatigue of getting 
there. We were driven to a large stone bunga- 
low, of which we were the sole occupants. A 



278 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

splendid old fellow, gray-bearded, with medals 
on his breast and a hunting-knife in his belt, 
greeted us at the entrance, and put himself and 
the household at our service. The food, the 
wines, the tobacco, and the service are of the best, 
and hearing me complain of lack of exercise, the 
steward provides me with a pony for a ride before 
breakfast each morning. At each meal he stands 
in the dining-room, with an eye to everything, and 
from morning till night he watches over our com- 
fort as though we were his children. 

In the afternoon we are driven to the lake, 
where we take a boat and are rowed to its south- 
ern end. We walk up a path to j5nd ourselves on 
a high terrace looking down upon a dusty plain 
where hundreds of wild pigs are grunting, squeal- 
ing, quarrelling as they are fed. Here we make 
our bow to our host. He had just come in from 
a panther hunt. Every afternoon when he is at 
home he is present at the feeding of these wild 
boars. He was standing with a circle of his cour- 
tiers behind him, and a mediseval-looking figure 
he was, a sword in his left hand, a long hunting- 
knife in his belt, and those about him all in hunt- 
ing tunics and boots. He was a slender, wiry- 
looking man of about sixty, well preserved and 
athletic, with nothing of the pallid hue of the 
puzzled thinker in his look, and a deep scar 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 279 

over his right eye due to a fall from his horse 
while pig-sticking. 

We bowed and shook hands, and through the 
interpreter I thanked him for his hospitality to us. 
I was somewhat taken aback when the interpre- 
ter repeated: "His Highness says you have no 
hospitality to thank him for since you have only 
just arrived." This seemed an attempt to put 
me on my mettle, so I turned and pointed to the 
lake with its marble palaces, and to the gleaming 
white towers of the huge palace overhanging the 
lake, and said: "Tell His Highness that one 
glimpse of this is a thousand years of hospitality." 
We had some further talk about horses and hunt- 
ing and then turned to go. As we were leaving, 
one of the suite came after us, and we returned, 
when the interpreter was bidden to tell me that 
His Highness hoped I would enjoy my stay, that 
I was to stay as long as I liked, and that he, the 
interpreter, was commanded to see to it that we 
had everything we wanted. 

He is a conservative of the conservatives, this 
prince. He speaks no English, lives his own life, 
never leaves India, will have nothing to do with 
the new-fangled notions of the day, is an enthusi- 
astic hunter of big game, has killed fifty tigers, be- 
sides panthers and other game, and has never 
been photographed while doing it, and is simple 



280 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

and dignified in his demeanor. There was an 
atmosphere of far-off, by-gone times on the ter- 
race that afternoon. It was as though I had 
dreamed myself back into the Middle Ages. He 
and his customs and habits and opinions are 
passing away, leaving him a lonely figure in a 
fussy world, but he remains unmoved, unchanged, 
disdainful. Now as I look back and remember 
India, he stands out easily as the first gentleman 
there, and upon the whole the most impressive 
figure I saw in all the East. 

When he heard that at the great Durbar, the 
Viceroy was to ride in front, and on the elephant 
beside him was to ride a woman, his wife, he 
declined to ride behind a woman, and sent his 
elephant, gorgeously caparisoned, but with an 
empty howdah. In these days when every man 
is either nursing or courting a constituency of 
some sort; when books are written, and news- 
papers are printed, and speeches are made, and 
sermons are preached ever with an eye to circu- 
lation or popularity; when weighing down the 
words and thoughts of every man's brain, except 
the tiniest minority, is the dull dead weight of 
its possible effect upon a selfish and supei-ficial 
mediocrity; when both men and women trim 
their sails shiveringly at the bare thought of being 
blacklisted socially or politically or morally, it is 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 281 

refreshing, it is even awesome, to meet a man 
whose only constituency is his own soul! I am 
not sure that we may not take steps backward 
toward Udaipur ere long, before we take many 
more along the path we are following. We may 
have better sewers, but I doubt if we have 
more moral courage, for it takes some moral 
courage to stand up to the empire which governs 
one in every five of the human race, and more 
than one in every five square miles of the habita- 
ble globe, and to stand alone. But the British 
like this man far better, I make no doubt, than 
those, whether from India or from any other 
country, who bend to them, agree with them, 
flatter them, and who mutilate their pride to 
become eunuchs of patriotism, whose capital is 
Paris, and whose creed is cosmopolitanism. 

As we were rowed back the length of the lake, 
the sun was going down, leaving a great curtain 
of dark purple as a background for the palace. 
This building stands on the crest of a ridge run- 
ning parallel to the lake, and a hundred feet above 
it, its granite and marble are all of one whiteness, 
and with this royal background it looked like a 
palace of alabaster with carved turrets of old 
ivory. There is only one other picture, in India, 
the Taj, which bears comparison with this lake 
and its surroundings. 



282 THE ^^^EST IN THE EAST 

The city, of some fifty thousand inhabitants, is 
entirely surrounded by a bastioned wall, and the 
palaces old and new within make a town of them- 
selves. On the great terrace running the length 
of the old palace, where the Maharana still keeps 
his own apartments, there is room to parade the 
whole army, cavalry, elephants, and all. From his 
windows this mediaeval prince can look out into 
this colossal court-yard, where he insists upon 
the old ways, and so w^e saw the afternoon we 
w^ere there, as you may see any other afternoon, 
bullocks, pigeons, chickens, elephants, camels, 
geese, all sunning themselves in lazy contentment. 
As we drove out of the palace, a magnate of this 
small kingdom rode in, mounted on a fine horse, 
the saddle and stirrup-straps of red velvet, and 
the bridle and reins of some red stuff as well. He 
himself was in brilliant-colored garments, a sword 
by his side, pistols in his belt, and there followed 
and surrounded him a retinue of fifty or more, 
mounted or on foot, with runners on ahead to 
clear the way for them through the crowded 
streets. 

These were delicious days we spent roaming 
over the palaces and gardens, in and out of the 
temples, and through the sunny streets of Udai- 
pur. The only sad spot in the picture was our 
reception by the son and heir in his apartments. 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 283 

He is a cripple, shrunken and thin, but with pleas- 
ant manners, a pathetic smile, and a little Eng- 
lish at his command. He was surrounded by 
the officers of his household, who looked stalwart 
indeed beside him, and it was evidently a real 
pleasure to him, as it was probably a rare one, to 
receive strangers. 

I remember particularly the garden palace 
so-called, which forms a part of the old palace, 
and is a hanging garden, filled with flowers and 
ferns, and palms and fountains, and with exqui- 
sitely carved pillars, and marble walls and floors 
all perched on a part of the flat roof; the wonder- 
ful carving of the marble around doors and win- 
dows; the garden of the court ladies, surrounded 
by a high wall, with a great marble swimming- 
bath in the centre and filled with flowers and 
shrubs; the Hindu temple of Jagannath with an 
elephant on each side of the long flight of marble 
steps leading up to it, and every inch of it carved ; 
the great gateways of the city, the Elephant gate, 
the Delhi gate, the Moon gate; the cenotaphs 
of the royal family for generations back, en- 
closed by a high wall and with many fine trees, 
and on more than one of these tombs mention 
of the number of the wives who burned them- 
selves when their masters died; the groups on 
foot or on horseback, of the bewhiskered gen- 



284 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

try, for even in a land where the beard is 
everywhere a mark of manly dignity, the Raj- 
put is conspicuous for his care of his beard, and 
by tying a scarf around his head and neck he 
curls out the ends of his w^hiskers, till sometimes 
they are tw^isted over behind his ears, lending him 
a dashing appearance, which his soldierly bear- 
ing emphasizes ; the startling appearance of gen- 
tlemen in the process of dying their beards black 
with henna, for during the interim their beards 
are a bright orange color, which gives a particu- 
larly fierce frame for the dark faces and eyes; 
and then the return to our own little palace with 
its superb view of lakes and hills, and our cosey 
dinners by candle-light, with the stew^ard w^atch- 
ing with jealous eye every movement of the bare- 
footed and turbaned servants who attended us; 
and well I remember one morning the shrieks 
and cries in our court-yard when the stew^ard, 
well over the age when most men enjoy a bout at 
fisticuffs, was seen giving a sound beating to a 
rapscallion who had maltreated the buffalo that 
brought us the skins full of water for our baths. 
Where could a man go for a holiday w^here he 
would escape more completely from modernity, 
and be able to look out of a casement set in the 
Middle Ages and see his own environment in per- 
spective; where better than to Ildaipur as the 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 285 

guest of the Maharana ? The setting is there in 
these bewilderingly beautiful surroundings, and 
surely the prince is there as a seal to stamp it as 
genuine. He is a direct descendant of the Raj- 
puts of Chitor. They were conquered by the 
Mughals as were the other Rajput clans, but they 
fled and found shelter among the mountains and 
deserts of the Indus, and, unlike the others, re- 
fused to mingle their high-caste Hindu blood even 
with that of a Muhammadan emperor. They 
still boast that they alone among the great Raj- 
put clans have never given a daughter in mar- 
riage to a Mughal emperor. Their motto is a 
fine one: "Who steadfast keeps the faith, him 
the Creator keeps." Certainly the present ruler 
is putting it to the test. Long life and success 
to him, say I! 

The Maharana' s hospitality guarded us even 
when we had left his capital. Four hours by 
train brought us to Chitorgah. There at the sta- 
tion an elephant and a tonga, a kind of two- 
wheeled cart drawn by ponies, awaited us and we 
were taken to see the citadel city where this fam- 
ily have ruled and fought ever since the begin- 
ning of the eighth century. On a rocky hill over 
five hundred feet high is the great fort over three 
miles in length. In the old tumultuous days the 
capital city of Mewar was Chitor, situated in this 



286 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

fort. On one occasion, after a siege in which 
eleven royal princes were killed, all the women 
entered an underground cave, and were there 
burned to death, and as the smoke and flames 
arose the men rushed out to throw themselves 
upon the swords of their Muhammadan enemies. 

The whole of the enclosure at the top is covered 
with the ruins of palaces and temples. The two 
towers of Fame and Victory, the one eighty feet 
high, the other in nine stories and one hundred 
and thirty feet high, are still well preserved. This 
so-called fortress could stow away the hill of the 
Acropolis in one corner and the Roman Forum 
in another, and impresses you with the magnifi- 
cent scale upon which these people carried out 
their building operations. How this place was 
ever captured, with its sides of sheer rock reach- 
ing up five hundred feet from the plain below, 
and crowned by walls so thick that one may 
drive along the tops of them, and this before the 
days of cannon, is a mystery, a mystery even to 
one who has seen Quebec and knows its story. 

When we arrived at the station at Chitorgah, 
the carriage was detached from the train and left 
on a siding. When we returned to it from the 
excursion to the fort, we found a kitchen estab- 
lished outside the carriage door, with pots and 
pans and dishes and charcoal fires, and a dinner 



HIS HIGHNESS THE MAHARAJA 287 

of several courses was there and then prepared 
and handed in to us. I was asked to sign a 
"chit" or voucher for it, for the Maharana's 
treasurer, but that I refused to do. It was Raj- 
put gallantry indeed to extend hospitality to 
guests so long as they remained in Rajput terri- 
tory, but we drank His Highness's health instead 
in our own brew, and at eleven o'clock the car- 
riage was attached to another train and we were 
off; with an abiding assurance that our Indian 
hosts, so far, had nothing to learn in the West of 
fine manners and generous hospitality. 



VII 

BUNIA— PANI 

IT would be easy to spend a year in India, and 
never hear the words Bunia or Pani. As a 
guest of affable officials, of native princes; 
as a visitor to Delhi, Agra, Benares, Amritsar, 
the ruins of Akbar's great city of Fatehpur-Sikri, 
to Bombay, Lucknow, and Calcutta, one may 
hear nothing of Bunia and Pani, At manoeuvres 
with the army, at the great meeting of the con- 
tingents of Imperial Service troops, when we 
were all the guests of Her Highness the Begum 
of Bhopal; shooting or pig-sticking with Indian 
or British potentates, you hear nothing of Bunia 
or Pani. You might come away from India 
thinking that the Viceroy and his brilliant con- 
sort drove about in splendid equipages with out- 
riders, postilions, and a mounted body-guard; 
that the governors of Bombay, and Madras did 
the same on a smaller scale; that the military 
and civilian officials were interested mainly in 
sport, and in making themselves comfortable. 
x\s a matter of fact, each and every one of 

288 



BUNIA — PANI 289 

these people, from His Excellency the Viceroy 
down to the last recruit to the civil service, is 
thinking of Bunia and PanL And well they 
may, for Bunia and Pani are the two great 
problems in India. 

You must tear away the magnificence and the 
rags; the Imperial etiquette and the splendor of 
the native princes; you must stop your ears to 
political and parliamentary discussion ; you must 
forget the polite European essayist who writes 
of his holiday in India, and likewise the bitter 
fulminations of the yeastily educated native jour- 
nalist; and you must study Bunia and Pani, 
otherwise you leave India as ignorant as when 
you first looked at a map of that vast continent. 

Pani means water. Bunia is the name for the 
local shopkeeper, grain merchant, and money- 
lender. 

Great Britain has invested capital in India for 
its commercial and industrial development, in- 
cluding the employment of its people, to the 
amount of $1,750,000,000. One-tenth of the en- 
tire trade of the British Empire passes through 
the seaports of India, and this sea-borne trade is 
more than one-third of the trade of the empire 
outside of the United Kingdom. India is the 
largest producer of food and raw material in 
the Empire, and the principal granary of Great 



290 THE ^^^ST IN THE EAST 

Britain. The imports into the United Kingdom 
of wheat, meal, and flour from India exceed those 
of Canada and are double those of Australia. 

It is said that the hoarded wealth of India, 
buried in the ground, stored in the treasure- 
houses of the native princes, and in the jew- 
elry and precious stones of the Indian men 
and women, small and great, amounts to 
$1,800,000,000. 

Aside from the strategical importance, what 
would the British Empire be without India, and 
what would India be if it were not that the Vice- 
roy and the 10,000 Europeans and the 1,500,000 
Indian government employees under him keep 
Bunia and Pani forever in mind! 

These 300,000,000 in India are agriculturists. 
Water for their fields means food and comfort; 
the lack of it means, fever, plague, and famine. 
And when fever, and plague, and famine come 
in India, they do not take a few score, or a few 
hundreds, or even thousands; they kill millions. 
In 1877 the famines in southern India alone 
swept away over five millions of people; and a 
few years ago, in the Punjab, over two millions. 

When we hear of a drought, we think of it in a 
hazy way, as an inconvenience connected with 
the laundry, the bath-room, or the garden; or at 
the worst a mill here or there must stop work for 



BUNIA — PANT 291 

a week or two. But what if it meant death by 
starvation of numbers equal to the whole popu- 
lation of Greater New York, or of the population 
of the whole Western division of States, or of all 
New England, in a few months! That is what 
it means in India. How little we know of the 
institutions, the codes, the religions, the obser- 
vances, the problems, the troubles of other peo- 
ples and of other lands ; and worse, how little we 
care even when we are undertaking to teach and 
to govern them! 

"When Mazarvan the Magician 

Journeyed Westward through Cathay, 
Nothing heard he but the praises 
Of Badoura on his way. 

"But the lessening rumor ended 
When he came to Khaledan, 
There the folk were talking only 
Of Prince Camaralzaman. 

"So it happens with the poets; 

Every province hath its own, 
Camaralzaman is famous. 
Where Badoura is unknown." 

The experience of Mazarvan the Magician 
is the experience of every other intelligent trav- 
eller. It was with eagerness therefore that I ac- 
cepted the opportunity to see Pani and Bunia at 
close quarters where 'Hhe folk were talking only" 
of them. 



292 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

The deputy-commissioner of a certain district 
in the Punjab was my host. He was about to 
make a tour of inspection. The Punjab has an 
area of 134,000 square miles and a population of 
25,000,000. Seven-eighths of this total popula- 
tion live in 33,000 villages w^ith an average popu- 
lation of about 500. Half of the population are 
Muhammadans; 6,000,000 are Hindus; 5,000,- 
000 of them are Jats, and these Jats are half 
of them Muhammadan, a fourth Hindu, and a 
million Sikh Jats, and they own half the land in 
the Punjab. Jat is the name given to the de- 
scendants of the Scythians who settled in India, 
and whose first great king was Kanishka. 

The Punjab is divided into twenty-nine dis- 
tricts each in charge of a deputy commissioner or 
collector; and these again are grouped into five 
divisions each under a commissioner. Each of 
these districts has its district board presided over 
by the deputy-commissioner, who is also a mag- 
istrate and collector of the district. There are 
some 1,500 members of these boards, of whom 
600 are elected. They are responsible for local 
matters, roads, schools, bridges, hospitals, dis- 
pensaries. In the large towns there are munic- 
ipal committees, and of the 1,500 members 
nearly 1,200 are non-officials, and they control 
and spend over $2,000,000 per annum. I cite 



BUNIA — PANI 293 

these facts not to bewilder the reader with details, 
but to show how the British Government strives 
to encourage the people in managing their own 
affairs. In the larger towns the members of 
these committees show some interest; but the 
members of the provincial committees take little 
interest, there is next to no discussion, and the 
European official chairman does the bulk of the 

work. 

The commissioner is under the control of the 
financial commissioner, who, under the lieuten- 
ant-governor of the Punjab, is the head of the 
revenue administration. The lieutenant-gov- 
ernor is the right hand of the Viceroy in the Pun- 
jab. Each district with its deputy-commissioner 
is divided into minor divisions called Tahsils, and 
a Tahsil as a rule contains two to four hundred 
villages, and a village may contain fifty huts, 
built of mud, and thatched with grass, and gene- 
rally containing one room, with sometimes a 
space enclosed with mud walls, where household 
duties are performed, where odds and ends are 
stored, and where the bullock or bullocks are 
tethered at night. 

It is a long way from the Viceregal Lodge, and 
the Viceroy, at Calcutta, to this hut and its occu- 
pants in the Punjab, but they are closely con- 
nected, as we shall see, and it is one of the glories 



294 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

of the British administration in India that this 
connection exists and is maintained. If the family 
in that hut in the Punjab is stricken with fever, or 
if the plague stalks in among them, the headman 
of the village goes to the dispensary, the official 
there reports to Delhi, Delhi reports to Lahore, 
and the lieutenant-governor there, to Calcutta. 
Almost before the relatives of that family know 
what has happened, they know in Calcutta ; and 
the machinery, with its net-work of living wires 
w^hich spreads over India like a vast cobw^eb, is 
put in motion to relieve that family in the hut in 
a village that few white people ever see. 

The deputy-commissioner, his young assistant, 
and I rode out of Delhi early one morning on our 
way to the first camp. We were not many miles 
from Delhi when three men met us on the road. 
Each held in his hand a rupee, which he offered 
to the deputy-commissioner with a profound 
salaam; this was touched and remitted, this be- 
ing the old sign of allegiance. Thus the feuda- 
tories of the great Mughals showed their allegi- 
ance to the Emperor ; thus the great native chiefs 
to-day offer a gold piece to the Viceroy, or to the 
governor of the province to which they belong; 
thus the headmen of these villages through which 
w^e passed made known their loyalty to the great 
British Raj, represented here and now by the 



BUNIA — PANI 295 

deputy-commissioner. Then begins a rapid, and 
sometimes excited, conversation as the represent- 
atives of the village walk beside us. The official 
replies fluently in the native's own tongue, and 
the expression on the faces shows their confid- 
ence in his self-control, patience, and experience. 
They know little, and care less, about legisla- 
tion, but this method of dealing with their affairs 
they both understand and enjoy. 

It is of the affairs and condition of their village 
that they talk. One complains that the cattle 
from a neighboring village stray into the fields 
and destroy the crops; another that three hun- 
dred of his village have died of the plague, and 
there are not enough laborers left to cultivate 
the soil and pay the taxes ; another asks that the 
irrigation canal be brought nearer to his village; 
another retails how^ the hail has spoilt the crops ; 
another that the white ants have destroyed the 
wheat ; another that members of the Arya-Somaj 
are preaching sedition among the villagers ; one, 
and what a relief his tale must have been to my 
long-suffering host, says that the taxes of his 
village are all paid, and that they are quite 
happy, as long as they have peace and safety 
*' under the shadow of the Protector of the Poor." 

The deputy-commissioner is as patient and 
polite to them as he is to me, when after leaving 



296 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

one after another of these groups, I begin a rapid 
fire of questions. Every now and again he de- 
cides to see for himself the situation in this or that 
village, and we set off at a brisk canter, leaving 
the main road to make for the village in question. 
They are all much the same, though differing in 
population. Fifty or more mud huts, w^ith the 
refuse stored in the compound of each, which is 
intended for manure, or fuel ; and the interior of 
the hut cleaner than I expected, for the walls and 
floors are covered with a mixture of mud and cow 
dung, which seems to be a cleanly, as it is a favorite 
form of whitewashing, since I saw it also used in 
the cavalry lines in many parts of India. Near 
the village is the so-called pond, a shallow place 
filled with stagnant water in which pigs, ducks, 
geese, cattle, and mosquitoes share and share 
alike. There are the village wells, some for high- 
caste, some for low-caste people; the village 
temple with its sacred tree, the peepul tree, is 
there; the council tree also, under which the 
leaders of public opinion smoke their pipes of 
an evening; there are the shops in the principal 
street with the proprietor squatting beside his 
open bags of salt, sweetmeats, grains and spices, 
these latter covered with flies and hornets and 
wasps; another sells brass and iron and bell- 
metal cooking utensils and water-jars; there are 



BUNIA — PANI 297 

the potters, and I see for the first time, and 
understand, the Bible's potter's thumb and pot- 
ter's wheel. 

"For I remember stopping by the way 
To watch the potter thumping his wet clay; 

And with its all-obliterated tongue 
It murmured — Gently, Brother, gently pray! '* 

I see the wheelwright building those awkward- 
looking carts which I have admired and won- 
dered at as they bumped their way unbroken 
over awful roads. They are made of wood, bam- 
boo, and string. They can give at every joint. 
That is the secret of their resistance. I see the 
shed where the children are taught; and in a few 
of the villages they are crushing the sugar-cane, 
boiling sugar, and doing well with the sale of it, 
coarse as it is. It is needless to say that the 
streets are not paved, and you walk ankle-deep 
in mud or dust; and goats, water-buffaloes, and 
sacred bulls have the same privileges, the sa- 
cred bulls rather more, than you. None of the 
dogs seems to have owners, each is out for him- 
self and the devil take the hindermost; and at 
night they and the jackals sing rival choruses. 
The men and children follow you about sol- 
emnly curious; the women, with bare legs and 
arms and shoulders, cover their faces as you pass, 
not as we think from modesty wholly, but be- 



298 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

cause it is considered an impertinence to look at 
us boldly. One or two of the houses are more 
pretentious; they have two stories, a tiled roof, 
and a court-yard, and the proprietor owns bul- 
locks and even a pony. This is the home of the 
Bunia, He buys, and sells, and lends money. 
He is the Hindu Shylock. 

A Hindu will spend a year's income on a mar- 
riage feast for his daughter. It is one of the 
Hindu social laws obeyed among them, as are 
similar laws among us, with toil, sacrifice, and ex- 
travagance; and with far more attention to de- 
tail than the moral law or the behests of religion. 
It is then that the native mortgages his fields, his 
crops, his everything, to provide a feast suitable 
to what he considers his station. He buys whis- 
tles just as we do, that we do not want, that do not 
whistle, or that give forth false and discordant 
notes ; because his little social world has made it 
the fashion. He could live very well, just as we 
could, if we only bought what we liked, and what 
we needed, but Heera Lall goes bankrupt, just 
as Mr. Climber and Mr. Splurge do, buying what 
they do not want in the way of whistles, to play 
tunes that nobody cares particularly to hear. 

Then the Bunia lends at twenty and fifty per 
cent and even more. The crops do not even 
pay the interest, let alone the taxes; and Heera 



BUNIA — PANI 299 

Lall is soon in the hands of the Jews, and labors 
from sunrise till sunset on the land which is no 
longer his. In years of poor crops, or when the 
peasant is sick or otherwise incapacitated, again 
the Bunia appears, not only as a lender, but 
tempting him to buy on credit. 

A parental government has stepped in to pro- 
tect the small land-owners; there are 3,000,000 
of them here in the Punjab alone. The new Land 
Alienation Act provides that no mortgage can be 
given for more than fifteen years, and the money- 
lender is not allowed to purchase except by per- 
mission. Sales are only allowed between agri- 
culturists, or where by the sale of part the whole 
is redeemed. Taxes are often remitted in years 
of bad crops, in whole or in part; and the gov- 
ernment lends money, at a low rate of interest, 
to poor communities to buy seed or cattle. This 
law for the protection of these helpless agricult- 
urists, and there are 250,000,000 of them here in 
India, was bitterly opposed by native babus, 
lawyers, money-lenders, and the leaders in the 
movement for representative government. Peace 
and quiet and prosperity have made land valua- 
ble in India; hence the intriguing to get pos- 
session of it. We know something of the land 
shark in America ; one needs little imagination to 
picture what would happen if he had his way in 



300 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

India. In a few years the land would be in the 
hands of a few, and the rest would be serfs. The 
government that brought Pani to India's fields, 
and a strong hand to control India's Bunias, 
brought salvation. 

No man has the smallest right to pronounce 
an opinion upon British rule in India, until he 
has seen the water trickling painfully through its 
fields, and the Bunia straining at the tether that 
keeps him in check. Here is the real problem, 
other matters are froth compared to it. 

It is bewildering to find that there is a society 
in America which, w^ith words and money, en- 
deavors to upset the British rule in India; more 
bewildering still to find members of this society 
in America, and labor leaders in England, taking 
sides in India with the blood-sucking Bunia and 
the agitators w^ho support him. Nothing but 
dense ignorance can explain it, unless it be that 
morbid craving for notoriety which leads the critic 
to rush into any convenient dusty room, waving 
a cloth about his head, careless of what becomes 
of the dust, so long as he occupies the centre of 
the room. Many rooms are dusty in all our civ- 
ilizations, and the only w^ay to clean them is with 
a damp cloth, and quietly, and a little at a time. 
But the demagogue, and the agitator, scoff at 
such methods ; first because such methods call for 



BUNIA — PANI 301 

work, and care, and study; and secondly because 
such work must be done quietly. What does 
Cleon care for such a job as that! Let there be 
strikes in England, famine and bloodshed in 
India, panics and excitement, and distress, in 
America, so long as Cleon occupies the centre 
of the stage for a brief moment, enjoying that 
delicious notoriety to which all else is sub- 
ordinated. 

We have ridden fifteen or twenty miles. It is 
getting hot and dusty, when we see the glimmer 
of tents, the smoke of fires, groups of camels, and 
attendants and servants, and we have reached 
camp. My tent measures thirty feet by twenty; 
it is carpeted with rugs, has a dressing-room with 
tub, wash-stand, and other necessaries. There is 
a writing-table and an easy chair. Your clothes 
are laid out, the hot bath is ready; and shaved, 
and bathed, and in light clothes, you are ready 
for breakfast. 

There is a mess-tent, the deputy-commissioner's 
office-tent and living-tent, the assistant's tent, 
and all is ready even to the pencils, pens, and 
blotters arranged on the office table. After 
breakfast the deputy-commissioner retires to his 
office, and one after another, singly and in groups, 
citizens and village officials appear with their 
troubles, complaints, disputes, and business. 



302 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Hour after hour he Hstens, questions, decides, 
and patches up differences. 

Court is held out here as in Delhi. A pictu- 
resque group, witnesses, prisoners, attorneys, 
police are squatting, or standing, around the door 
of the assistant's tent; and for two hours or more 
he deals with a case of the theft of clothes from 
one woman by another. The clothes of the 
whole party would scarcely bring a dollar at 
auction, I should guess ; but here as in Bombay, 
or in Calcutta, justice holds sway, and the low- 
liest may claim and receive protection. 

After five hours' work or more, we are off on 
our ponies, led by some of the sportsmen of the 
village, and one evening we returned with a bag 
which included duck, hare, rabbits, a species of 
Indian grouse, and a deer. We dress and dine, 
and dine well, and after a chat and a smoke, to 
bed. The sounds are strange; the gurgling of 
the loose-lipped camels, the cries of the jackals 
and yelping of the pariah dogs, the raucous cry 
of the peacocks, the chattering of monkeys and 
perroquets; then for a time the noise and bustle 
of loading protesting camels and getting under 
way. 

There is a duplicate set of tents, and each 
night at about eleven all but our sleeping-tents, 
and the bare necessities of the morning toilet. 



BUNIA — PANI 303 

are loaded on the camels and set off for another 
camp ; those we leave behind in the morning go 
on, not to the next camp, but to the camp after 
that, so that each day, after our three or four 
hours' ride, we find the camp set and ready for 
us, and litigants, questioners, quarrellers, and 
many who come merely to pay their respects, 
warned beforehand of our coming, are there, 
waiting the arrival of the ''Protector of the Poor," 
as my host is often called, and as he is, for that 
I can vouch from daily personal observation. 

At one of these camps there appears Rai 
Bahadur, a title conferred upon him by govern- 
ment, Chaudhuri Raghu-nath Singh. He is what 
might be called a country gentleman in a small 
way. He owns land, he is a magistrate of the 
second class, and he is the head and representa- 
tive of a certain group of villages and is called a 
Zaildar, At the request of the deputy-commis- 
sioner he shows me nearly a dozen medals and 
one order given to his grandfather, his father, 
and to himself for meritorious services as soldiers 
in the native army. There is a mutiny medal 
and two medals for services with Lord Roberts 
among them. I was glad to meet him. He is 
the other side of the shield, and poles apart from 
the restless and discontented Bengali. He is a 
stanch believer in British rule, has fought as a 



304 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

soldier, and now works as a good citizen, bearing 
his share of the common burden, modest, unas- 
suming, and efficient. He accompanies us part 
way on our next day's journey, and is evidently 
as respected by the natives we meet as he is by 
my host. 

This title of Zaildar leads to an explanation. 
The unit of the revenue administration in India 
is the estate or Mahal which is usually identical 
with the village or Mauza. Each district is di- 
vided into several Tahsils and a Tahsil includes 
from two to four hundred of these villages. Each 
Tahsil has a separate land revenue assessment. 
Each village is represented by one or more head- 
men or Lavibardars, The villages again are 
grouped together into Zails, by bonds of histori- 
cal or tribal associations, or common interests, 
and these Zails are represented by a Zaildar ^ ap- 
pointed by the deputy-commissioner, from among 
the headmen of the different villages. Each vil- 
lage too has its Patwari or village accountant, we 
should call him the town clerk, who keeps the 
books for revenue purposes. He records mort- 
gages, keeps the record of the land-owners, of 
changes of ownership, of assessments and of 
boundaries, and other matters pertaining to his 
office. Thus there is a chain from each little vil- 
lage and from each dweller therein, up to the 



BUNIA — PANI 305 

financial commissioner himself. It is an admi- 
rable system, adopted from the Mughal emperors 
by the British, with changes and improvements, 
and kept going by these deputy-commissioners 
and their assistants, and at the same time checked 
by them by the method I am now seeing, of 
travelling through the country and keeping in 
touch with the people themselves. Whatever 
else may happen, these few officials must keep 
themselves fit for their arduous and never-ending 
duties. Seldom do they ask for or receive an 
Aegrotat; and as a body they seem to take it for 
granted that they will receive little praise and 
less recognition for their services; and yet no 
body of men in the British Empire is doing so 
much to keep their empire together and in peace. 

Besides the revenue tax, each headman gets 
five per cent for collecting from his village, and 
also eight and one-fourth per cent is set aside for 
various village needs. Not only do these land 
revenue methods keep the people constantly in 
touch with the officials, but in addition there 
are the schools, the police, the medical depart- 
ments, all again with representatives in every 
village, so that the smallest and most far-away 
community is cared for. 

Although each of these small proprietors, there 
are 3,000,000 of them here in the Punjab, owns 



306 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

his land, he owns it only as the tenant. The 
landlord in the old days was the Mughal Em- 
peror, and in these, is the British King-Emperor. 
A share of the profits from the land belongs to 
the ruler, by the traditions of centuries. The 
total revenue of India is roughly $240,000,000. 
Of this $91,000,000 are raised by taxation which 
includes an excise tax on salt, spirituous liquors, 
and drugs, and a customs duty averaging about 
five per cent; about $46,000,000 from state 
profits; and $100,000,000 from revenue from the 
state's share in the land. The taxation is less 
than forty-four cents per head of the population, 
and even when the land revenue, which as we 
have seen is really rent, is included, it is less 
than seventy-eight cents. The system of self- 
government in these villages and towns has 
been pushed as far as can be with due regard 
to efficiency. There are 750 municipalities in 
India which administer the affairs of 17,000,000 
people, and of the 10,000 official members 8,700 
are natives, and they dispense an income of over 
$30,000,000. There are 1,100 local boards, 
charged with the care of village education, sanita- 
tion, roads, and other civil works, which dispense 
$20,000,000 a year; and of these an even larger 
proportion of the members are natives. The de- 
mands of the state for its share of the profits of 



BUNIA — PANI 307 

the land are revised at recurring periods of from 
ten to thirty years. In Bengal alone the demand 
of the state was fixed in perpetuity by Lord 
Cornwallis in 1793. The state has lost millions 
in consequence. British improvements have in- 
creased both the value of the lands and of the 
crops, but only the proprietors profit. 

These are dry bones, these figures, but the 
reader who has a dim notion that India to-day is 
governed by a little knot of Englishmen must be 
told to what a very large extent these English- 
men have turned over the responsibilities of gov- 
ernment to the Indians themselves, and at what 
small cost per head of population this govern- 
mental machinery is run. 

During the hours when my host is at work in 
his office tent, I prowl about in the neighboring 
villages, talking to school-masters, town-clerks, 
shopkeepers, and the laborers in the fields. In 
one village the Patwari or town-clerk shows me 
his books, his maps of the village lands, and we 
walk over to a certain field, and he points out on 
the linen map its boundaries, and then turns to his 
books and shows me the names of the family who 
own it, and their ancestors, and the liens upon 
it. In some of these villages there are genea- 
logical tables which trace back the descent of 
each man for ten or even twenty generations. 



308 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

It may be puzzling to read, but it is clear 
enough when you stand in the field and see the 
owner and his son, drawing water in the leathern 
bucket with their bullocks, walking slowly up and 
down the ramp; when you hear the Patv:ari tell 
how the owner came to be the owner; what the 
amount of the mortgage is, how much the govern- 
ment has remitted on account of a bad year, how 
much has been paid back, and how much is still 
owing; how much that new well cost, and how 
much the government advanced toward its build- 
ing ; how much the crop from that field in which 
you are standing generally fetches, and what pro- 
portion is paid in taxes; whether that particular 
peasant proprietor is industrious and economical 
or not; how many children he has, and what it 
costs him to live. 

You find that he and his family live upon the 
produce of his own land. The corn is ground 
into flour in his own house by the womenfolk; 
the pulse, spices, and occasional vegetables come 
from his own fields; even the tobacco he smokes, 
and the hemp he uses for ropes, are grown by 
himself. What little he sells is for money to pay 
taxes, buy clothes, and perhaps to pay wages 
when he needs additional labor. His cattle are 
for milk or work in the fields, for he may not 
use them for food, his caste forbiddins; this. In 



BUNIA — PANI 309 

the winter he and, so it appears to the visitor in 
India, all the rest of the Indian population, are 
chewing sugar-cane ; in the summer the fruit of 
the mango tree is equally popular. When you 
attempt to draw him into conversation on the 
subject of even the most elementary politics you 
find him puzzled and uninterested. He is not 
only not demanding "elective institutions," but 
he does not know what they are, and the read- 
ing of a stray news sheet in the vernacular to 
him, by one of his more learned neighbors, 
leaves him dazed and bewildered. A voluble 
place-hunter, orating to him of his rights and 
privileges, leaves him impassive and undisturbed. 
The policeman, the headman of his village, the 
sight occasionally of a Zaildar, or a European 
oflScial, are all he knows of authority. He 
sleeps peacefully in the traditions that have 
filtered to him through centuries, and would 
be happy indeed if he could control Pani and 
escape Bunia. 

You have your ear against the real heart of 
India out there, and you hear it beating. This 
is the heart of the hundreds of millions of India. 
What you heard in Parliament; what you heard 
from the politicians in London ; what you heard 
from lawyers and editors in Bombay and Calcutta, 
and from teachers and preachers in Aligarh and 



310 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Benares, and from missionaries everywhere, is 
diagnosis, is theory, is the dreaming of the scio- 
list, or the bitter envy of the Brahman. It is 
here, with Pani gurgling beneath your feet, with 
the tiles of the Bunia's house overtopping the 
mud huts of the village, in plain view, with the 
Patwari's linen map spread out before you, that 
you can put your fingers on India's wrist and 
know something of the patient's condition. 

The word "Delirium" comes from two Latin 
words: "De," meaning "from," and "Lira," 
meaning "furrow." Etymologically, a man in 
delirium is one who leaves the furrow, who 
ploughs crookedly, who gets out of, and away 
from his field. The city-bred man may well 
ponder the ancestry of this word. The stirrers- 
up of the man working placidly in the fields will 
find more hysteria, more delirium in the towns 
and cities than in the fields and their furrows. 
Here in India, and I am not sure that it is not 
as true elsewhere, the patient's pulse beats more 
steadily, more quietly in the furrow, than w^hen 
leaving the plough and the fields he becomes 
giddy in the streets and bazaars of the town. 
At any rate it is true that even in our great new 
cities of the West, there are few leaders, in what- 
ever realm of activity, who are not themselves, 
or whose immediate ancestors are not, country- 



BUNIA — PANI 311 

bred. Two or three generations are about all 
that any family can survive of city life. Back 
to the land is a modern cry, but it is as old as 
language; it is the exact opposite in meaning to 
''Delirium." 

The English official is not only doing his duty 
in making these pilgrimages through the land, 
but he is adapting, for purposes of his own, meth- 
ods that are as old as India. The Durbar is, 
with the exception of certain religious customs, 
the oldest, most respected, and the most funda- 
mental of all Oriental institutions. Briefly, the 
Durbar means : the right of the subject to make, 
and the necessity of the ruler to receive and to 
hear, petitions in public. The Durbar halls that 
one sees everywhere in India are the monuments 
of the theory of justice which obtains everywhere 
in the East, and which is so imbedded in the 
Oriental mind that it is wellnigh impossible to 
uproot it. All his rulers of whatever race, and 
however despotic, from Kanishka to Akbar and 
Aurangzeb, have held Durbars, often daily 
Durbars, and no one of them would have dared 
to neglect or do away with them. 

The Oriental is a religious man. He believes 
in the ways of God with men ; he believes it so gen- 
uinely that he would make it part and parcel of 
his life here. He therefore prefers a ruler who 



312 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

is omniscient and omnipotent, who is both judge 
and executioner. He demands the right to be 
heard in public, to receive an answer on the spot, 
and to have the decree of the judge executed at 
once. If he is to lose his life, or his property, or 
his office, or if he is to deprive another of life, 
property, or office, that seems to him the simplest 
and fairest way to do it. Although the emper- 
ors of India were in a sense despots, as are, and 
have been, all Eastern rulers, in that they had 
the power of life and death, they never have 
been despots in the sense that their subjects had 
not access to them, and demanded it and re- 
ceived it as a right. 

The Oriental mind has no conception of equal- 
ity between men. Even in matters of justice, 
he dislikes rules of procedure, laws of evidence. 
He prefers that the matter should be settled face 
to face between himself and the ruler. As he 
sacrifices to his gods, and does penance and gives 
gifts that he may be well treated by them, so like- 
wise he sees not justice but only injustice in being 
deprived of the opportunity to give gifts, to use 
cunning, to bring social or political pressure to 
bear upon the man who is to judge him. He does 
not scout at equality, he does not even know what 
it means. He sees on every hand that men differ 
in ability, in wealth, and in influence; and he 



BUNIA — PANI 313 

wishes to use such superiority as he has, and be- 
lieves in the same privilege for other men, even 
in the courts, and before his judge, and with 
his ruler. He cannot understand that superior 
standing in the community is of any value, unless 
it can be used even in the courts for his own ad- 
vantage. This is a religion in the East; we con- 
sider such an attitude criminal in the West. But 
how many rich murderers are hanged ; how many 
rich thieves are imprisoned ; how many powerful 
political bribers are punished, in America.^ I 
am not sure that any of us really care for justice. 
I notice that even religion tempers justice with 
divine grace, and that the best human nature 
everywhere tempers justice with love. 

The Western man believes in himself, not in 
God. He hedges every authority with rules and 
laws and regulations. Each man, whether judge, 
or executive, or representative, is made responsi- 
ble to some one else. There is always an appeal 
to somebody else. The responsibility goes in a 
circle, from the citizen to the magistrate, from 
the magistrate to the court, from that court to the 
next, thence to Congress itself, and thus back to 
the citizen again. Men trust God, when they 
believe in Him, but they do not trust men when 
they do not believe in Him. The Oriental detests 
these roundabout processes. He demands a de- 



314 THE ^^^EST IN THE EAST 

cree on the spot, from a ruler whom he is willing 
to consider infallible. This is the puzzle to the 
Western man in all Eastern countries. But that 
underlying difference exists in India, China, Per- 
sia, Turkey, Egypt, even in Japan, despite their 
flimsy imitation of representative government, 
today, as it has always existed. 

One of the difficulties of governing In India to- 
day is this unending circle of responsibility. An 
unending correspondence, academic discussions 
with annotations, beginning in the village of fifty 
huts and ending in Parliament; with the result 
that officials who ought to be spending most of 
their time travelling through the country, as we 
are doing, are bending over desks loaded with 
files of documents and letters. 

Be it said that all officials from the Viceroy 
down, do make these pilgrimages through the 
country from time to time, but there would be 
much less trouble if they did so far more fre- 
quently. Be it said too that I am not advocating 
any " off-with-his-head " form of government 
here or anywhere else; but this Durbar system, 
modified and controlled has its merits ; and to one 
who has seen it in actual operation, it is evident 
how suitable it is to the situation and how wel- 
come it is to the people. In several of the native 
regiments the English officers hold Durbars. 



BUNIA — PANI 315 

The accused is heard in public, judged in public, 
and sentenced there and then in the presence of 
his fellows. There is no secrecy, no incompre- 
hensible rules of procedure ; and I was told over 
and over again, by their officers, that the men 
seldom objected when punishment was meted 
out to them thus in the open. 

This camping through the country is a sort of 
peripatetic Durbar, sl carrying on of the oldest 
traditions of the East, and that it is well liked and 
looked upon as a boon, as an institution under- 
stood by the humblest of the people, is evident by 
the welcome accorded the official everywhere. 
These are the men ; these men and the army offi- 
cers, brought into daily contact w^ith the native 
troops, so it seems to me, who are solving the 
problems and lightening the burdens of this huge 
mass of people in India. It is easy to become 
viewy when one gets away from daily contact 
with the problems of government. Not only in 
the East, but in the West as well, one wonders 
sometimes whether we are not devoting so much 
time to the teaching and discussion of how to gov- 
ern that we forget to govern; and after all the 
only way to govern, is to govern. In the West, 
representative government has resulted in such a 
chaos of law-making that whole communities, 
and vast aggregations of capital and labor, are 



316 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

now engaged in trying to disentangle themselves, 
so that they may be free to go about their busi- 
ness. Here in India, where only some 500,000 
out of the 300,000,000 can write and speak 
English, it is necessary that the governing power 
should be simple, open to all, and definite. 

As I stand in this field in the Punjab, and think 
of the seething mass of corruption, political and 
moral, in France; of England, with one in every 
forty of her population dependent upon the state ; 
of New York, the greatest city in the greatest re- 
public in the world, ruled and robbed by the most 
corrupt society of plunderers ever kept together 
for an hundred years, a society which, if it were 
an individual, could only be rivalled by the worst 
of the popes, or the most decadent of the Nawabs 
of Oudh, I realize that the problem of govern- 
ment is not solved by any easy expansion of the 
suffrage. 

According to the new council provisions, by 
which the councils of the Viceroy, and of the gov- 
ernors and lieutenant-governors, have been en- 
larged by the addition of more Indian members, 
the financial statement is subject to the moving 
of a resolution by any member. According to this 
new rule, these members will have even greater 
liberty than is accorded to a member of the Brit- 
ish Imperial Parliament itself. A member of 



BUNIA — PANI 317 

Parliament may not propose an increase of ex- 
penditure, but only the reduction of a grant. An 
Indian member of these new councils may pro- 
pose an increase of expenditure, provided the 
source from which it can be met is indicated. 

I was present at the opening of the first re- 
formed council of the Lieutenant-Governor of the 
Punjab at Lahore, as the guest of His Honour, 
and I saw the members sworn in. With the taste 
for oratory, and for metaphysical discussion, of 
the educated native, and there was evidence of 
these qualities even on this occasion, these English 
officials will have even less time than now for 
travelling through the country. These officials 
are overworked now, and from that plucky and 
daring sportsman. Lord Minto, down, I saw man 
after man who was overstrained by the responsi- 
bilities put upon him. The sad feature of it is 
that it is red tape that does it. Problems that an 
official ought to solve on the spot, in Durbar 
fashion, go roaming their way through reams of 
correspondence, checked by this one and that 
one, until the simple problem, probably arising 
from Pani or Bunia, becomes an octopus, with 
a bewildered official at the end of each tentacle. 

I beg that my American readers will notice 
this contrast between the poor peasant of the 
Punjab and the emphatic display made by the 



318 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

enlarging of the provincial councils. Perhaps 
500,000 Indians are affected by the latter, while 
there are 299,500,000 of the former. The 299,- 
500,000 are dumb and inaudible; but they are 
the people whom England has torn from the grip 
of tyranny, and to whom she owes the stern safe- 
guarding of their interests. She has no right to 
forget them, to lessen her care of them, by having 
too few officials to look after them, while engaged 
in academic discussions of the rights of a few to 
representation. 

We have exactly the same problem confront- 
ing us in the Philippines and in Cuba. From 
priest and tyrant we extricated the natives, and 
our first duty is to them. Why do these rheto- 
ricians in India, in the Philippines, and in Cuba 
demand the right to govern now, when we as 
the responsible police must in the end bear the 
burden of blunders or of dangers.^ Why did 
they not save their country when she was in 
chains.^ What proofs have we that they are 
capable now ? None ! 

Indeed we are finding, even amongst the en- 
lightened citizens of America, that representa- 
tive government is not the solution of all prob- 
lems, not the remedy for all diseases. In many 
of our communities they have discovered the 
viciousness of this circle of responsibility, with its 



BUNIA — PANI 319 

tail in its mouth. There are nearly an hundred 
towns and small cities in America governed by 
Commissions, at the time of this writing. The 
citizens have chosen from three to half a dozen 
experts to manage their municipal affairs. They 
have transferred their authority as representatives 
to them, and they hold them responsible. This 
method has proved so economical, so efficient, and 
gives the private citizen so much more time for 
his own affairs, that the number of communities 
wishing to be so governed is rapidly on the in- 
crease. Government by reverberation touched 
up with stealing, has proved so costly, and so 
insolently negligent, that even the easy-going 
and optimistic American is turning from it to 
government by experts. As we have shown in 
another chapter (From Mughal to Briton) the 
roads of life are becoming overcrowded, and 
men have all they can do to carry their burdens 
and to keep on the road, without the delay and 
amateur fumbling of keeping the road guarded 
and in repair. That should be left to trained 
road-builders. 

If the British in India, and we in the Philip- 
pines and in the West Indies, permit ourselves to 
be led astray in our colonies, either by ignorant 
politicians at home or by self-seeking politicians 
in our colonies, we shall prove ourselves unfaith- 



320 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ful to over 300,000,000 of ignorant and helpless 
wards, representing one-fifth of the inhabitants 
of the globe. 

The cleanest, the healthiest, and the most eco- 
nomically governed towns and cities in the world 
are in Germany, and the viewy reverberator and 
the politician by trade receive small shrift there ; 
for their passing has enabled Germany to support 
the most formidable army, one of the most 
powerful navies, the second largest merchant 
marine, and the second largest export and import 
trade in the world, with a population of 65,000,- 
000, living in an area of slightly more than 
200,000 square miles. 

The conflict in India should not be narrowed 
to an academical discussion between Oxford and 
Cambridge babus, and Bengali babus. No 
buncombe plea at home, no cunning arguments 
by educated natives abroad, should tempt us to 
hand over our wards to the mercy of amateur 
politicians. 



VIII 

A VISITOR'S DIARY 

FROM the south to the north of India is a 
long way; but the difference in the alert- 
ness, the physique, and the faces of the 
inhabitants makes it seem as though you had 
gone clean out of one country into another. It 
is almost like going from the streets of a factory 
town in New England, or old England, to our 
Western plains, or to the Highlands of Scotland, 
to go from the bazaars of southern or central 
India to the northern frontier. They are a 
bold, fine-looking lot, these Pathans and Afridis. 
The Pathans are allied to the Afghans ; and the 
Afridis are one of the large clans, or tribes, of 
the hills between India and Afghanistan. 

Never have I seen, in one hour's walk, so many 
lean, upstanding, fearless-looking, fine-featured, 
eagle-eyed men, as in Peshawar and the Khaibar 
Pass. Their faces remind one of the faces of our 
own Indians of the North-west of twenty-five 
years ago, chiefs like Red-Cloud and Hollow- 

321 



322 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Horn-Bear, whose faces were like reddish-brown 
masks of Dante or Savonarola. 

Peshawar is the head-quarters of the first army 
division, and is in the extreme northern corner of 
India. It is the residence of the Chief Commis- 
sioner of the North- West Provinces. It is at the 
southern entrance to the Khaibar Pass, which 
is the narrow road through the mountains to 
Afghanistan. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and 
Fridays, the caravans go and come. Hundreds 
of camels, donkeys, and oxen, loaded with mer- 
chandise from Central Asia, from Afghanistan, 
from Merve and Bokhara and even beyond, choke 
the road. The British distribute a subsidy of 
about fifty thousand dollars a year among- the 
headmen of these fighting tribes, in lieu of the 
loot that they took from the caravans in the old 
days ; and for these two days in each week cara- 
vans are permitted to go and come in safety. The 
British have organized a force of some fifteen 
hundred men from these Afridis, nine hundred 
infantry, and six hundred cavalry, in charge of a 
dozen European oiOficers, and they are the guar- 
dians of the Pass. It is a lonely business for 
the British officers who command these wild fel- 
lows at these outposts. They are not only the 
British pickets on the outermost frontier, they 
are the pickets for the whole white race, between 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 323 

them and the Tartar and the Mongol ; between 
Asia and Europe in short. Through this Khai- 
bar Pass they have rushed the defences, these 
Persians, Tartars, Turks, Afghans, and Mughals, 
time and time again, and in every century down 
to this present century, and they are untamed 
still. The officers in these mountainous wilds 
may not even go out for a day's shooting without 
an armed escort. 

When we left Peshawar to drive through the 
Pass, the officer with us carried his holsters with 
him; not that there is danger of a rising, or an 
outbreak, but these fanatical Muhammadans 
sometimes break out, one at a time, into hys- 
terical religious rage, run amok, as it is called, 
and seek salvation by the murder of an infidel. 
It is a narrow road, and all along it on the 
hills above one sees at intervals the Afridi 
Rifles, stationed to guard the passing cara- 
vans. The camels shuffie along, their noses in 
the air, loaded with women and children, and 
all sorts of goods of every description. The 
donkeys too carry baskets filled with chickens, 
amongst other things; and women and children 
and chickens alike seem no more concerned than 
the people one sees in a passing train at home. 

There are noise, and bustle, and dust, and 
shouting enough when the caravan from the north 



324 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

meets and passes the caravan from the south; 
but camels, and donkeys, and bullocks, and 
sheep, and men, pass one another somehow m 
the clouds of dust, and come out of this moving 
cat's cradle each with his own. Boxes of tea, 
furniture, pans and kettles, and here and there a 
Jewal, or camel bag, one of the beautiful carpets 
made in Merve of silk and Pashmina, a kind of 
sheep; the wool being taken for these fine car- 
pets only from the root part of the wool, may be 
seen, and perhaps bought, or perhaps an old 
Pindi carpet, and than these there is nothing 
finer of the kind in the world. 

But it is only on Tuesdays and Fridays that 
this road is a safe and quiet place for the traffic 
and merchandise. On other days you go at 
your own risk. Family and tribal feuds have 
free play, at other times, and there is seldom a 
day when one or another is not taking a pot shot 
at an enemy ; there the dogs of war, small though 
they be, are snarling, snapping, and biting all the 
time. The recruits for this corps of Afridi Ri- 
fles are drawn from men of different tribes, who 
forget their feuds for the time, but renew them 
diligently when they have a few weeks' leave. 

An officer of high rank was leading some troops 
through the Pass on one occasion, when he was 
annoyed by a tribesman above the road who kept 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 325 

abreast of them, and every now and then took a 
shot at them. One of the Afridi escort volun- 
teered to hunt this man down, but the officer said 
no, it did not matter. At last a bullet struck so 
close that the officer's horse stumbled and nearly 
fell. Then the soldier was told he might go and 
try to track down the persistent marksman. In 
an hour or two, the escort saw a puff of smoke, 
and the man was seen to fall and roll down the 
cliff. The Afridi returned and reported. The 
officer complimented and thanked him. ''Oh, 
that's nothing," replied the soldier, *'I should not 
be worthy to serve the white king if I could not do 
that." WTiy was it so easy? he was asked. ''Be- 
cause that man up there himself taught me to 
track," he replied. "You knew him, then ? " said 
the officer. "Oh, yes, I knew him. That was 
my father!" 

They are indeed a wild community. Their 
women are slaves who are trafficked in like cat- 
tle. A man's father dies, for example, and the son 
puts up his mother and sisters at auction, as part 
of the estate. You see men working in the fields, 
or on the road, a gun slung over their shoulders, 
carried there as the safest place for it. Here and 
there are small fortresses of mud, where this fam- 
ily or that protects itself from attack, or sits watch- 
ing an opportunity to bring down a passing ene- 



326 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

my. I saw a long ditch leading from the road, 
and looking like the dry bed of a canal, and I 
was told that this was the ingenious path made 
by a certain householder to get to the road out 
of reach of his enemy's rifle, whose house was 
near by. It is veritably the last remaining cock- 
pit of the world, these hills and mountain paths 
between northern India, and central Asia and 
Afghanistan. 

The Amir of Afghanistan winks at the lawless- 
ness, not altogether displeased to have these wild 
tribesmen between his dominions and the Brit- 
ish. The Amir is an independent ruler, except 
that he may not make treaties or give franchises 
without the consent of the British Government. 

It was from these wild fellows that the truly 
wonderful corps of "The Queen's Own Corps 
of Guides" was recruited. There are some four- 
teen hundred of them, infantry and cavalry, com- 
manded by British oflScers and picked from the 
dare-devils of this devil's own country. There 
are Afridis, Pathans, Kliuttucks, Sikhs, Punjabi 
Muhammadans, Punjabi Hindus, Gurkhas, Tur- 
comans, Persian Farsiwans, Kabulis, and Dogras 
among them. Sir Henry Lawrence, of Lucknow 
fame, started the organization and gave it its name, 
and Harry Lumsden was their first commander. 
For sixty years they have desen^ed the confidence 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 327 

and the hopes of their founder, by their loyalty, 
their daring, their trustworthiness; and as their 
founder was a Lawrence, one can hardly say 
more. When the Mutiny broke out they marched 
five hundred and eighty miles to Delhi, marching 
on an average twenty-seven miles a day, at the 
hottest time of year, through the hottest re- 
gion on earth. As they neared the Ridge at 
Delhi after this almost unprecedented feat of en- 
durance, a staff oflScer rode up and said: "How 
soon will you be ready to go into action .?" "In 
half an hour," was the cheery answer of their 
commander, Daly ; and in the fight that followed 
every British officer, including Daly, was killed 
or wounded. 

"And men in desert places, men 

Abandoned, broken, sick with fears 
Rose singing, s\\^ng their swords agen. 
And laughed and died among the spears." 

Readers weary of the self-advertising crew of 
explorers, amateur soldiers, sportsmen, and poli- 
ticians ; weary too of even the gallant Sir Galahads 
of fiction ; may turn to "The Story of the Guides," 
by one of their commanders, Younghusband, 
with promise of refreshment and encouragement. 
There are real men among us still, both brown 
and white, who not only do their duty without 



328 THE \VEST IN THE EAST 

making a fuss about it, but who die doing it ; and 
their only reward is, that there is a gulp in the 
throat and a wetness about the eyelids as we 
read; and a tightening of the lips, and a prayer 
that we may do half as well, but, w^ell or ill, that 
we may not be tempted into the maudlin modern 
malady of self-advertisement. It makes the 
chorus-girl posturings of many of our candidates 
for popular applause look shamefully ridiculous. 

That Khaibar Pass is indeed "the way of sin- 
ners" ; but the ''Story of the Guides" shows how 
these very sinners may be made weapons, and 
ideally-tempered weapons, for the defence of the 
right, when they are disciplined and led by the 
right men. 

Very different is this Muhammadan city of 
Peshawar from those villages in the Punjab. 
The streets are crowded with fierce-looking men, 
Kashmiris, Nepalese, Beluchis, Tibetans, Yar- 
kandis, Bokhariots, and Turcomans, armed most 
of them, and in every kind of costume. They 
pour in here twice a week from Afghanistan, from 
the surrounding districts, and from central Asia ; 
and you have seen something new indeed in the 
way of wild life from the top of the world, after a 
few hours among them. They have the look of 
men who depend upon their own prowess, and 
not upon the law, for their safety. 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 329 

I stationed myself upon the top of tlie high city 
gate one morning, and watched the housekeeping 
in the town. Each house has a roofless room, 
with walls some ten feet high, and as you look 
down, you may see the women and children, the 
cats and pigeons, the sewing and washing, the 
combing of hair, and the home life of the whole 
population. The women and children, the cats 
and pigeons are there, but the men are in the 
streets ; and to see the barber stropping his razor 
on his shin, and shaving a customer in the road, 
full of camels, goats, bullocks, carts, and pedes- 
trians, is to see two men whose nerves must have 
been disciplined by much familiarity with cold 
steel. 

The military is much in evidence here, and at a 
dinner at the house of the general commanding, 
one sees uniforms from every branch of the ser- 
vice, and medals won all over the world ; and hears 
talk, and stories of the adventurous life of these 
frontiersmen of the Empire. I dance in the state 
quadrille with my host, the Chief Commissioner's 
wife, as my partner, and a crow one must look, in- 
deed, in this crowd of brilliant uniforms. During 
these holiday weeks at Christmas-time, Peshawar, 
and Lahore, and Lucknow, where I happened to 
be, were gay indeed with dinners and dances, and 
polo and horse-shows, and one catches glimpses 



330 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

now and then of some of the hangers-on of the 
official Hfe here, who, having no duties and no 
responsibilities, furnish the gossip, scandal, and 
heart-burnings of the social life of India. '*Do 
you see that woman ?" said a bluff colonel to me 
at a certain dance. "Well, she ought to be de- 
ported." It was easy to see what he meant, 
particularly if you had met the lady at dinner. 
They drift out from England, through some at- 
tenuated connection with the civil or military 
life here, and some of them are odd specimens 
enough. Weather-beaten female warriors they 
look. One I can see now, in the twilight of her 
youth, a widow, grass or genuine I know not 
which, lean and tough of physique; no matter 
how long she stewed she would not make broth 
for a meal; with a prehensile smirk, as though 
she would fasten on to anybody. Indeed, watch- 
ing her methods, I should not have been sur- 
prised, at any time, to see her take jflight with a 
juicy subaltern dripping in her talons. 

Harvard men may be surprised, as they will be 
proud to learn, that a Doctor of Philosophy of 
their making, an archaeologist now in the employ 
of the British Government, has turned up here as 
the discoverer of the casket said to contain the 
bones of Buddha. It is a recent discovery, and 
one of the most important, and he brought it him- 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 331 

self, and showed us the Greek designs, and the 
name of the Scythian King Kanishka upon it; 
Kanishka who ruled in north-east India about 
40 A. D., and who was an enthusiastic disciple of 
Buddha, and who had the sacred books codified, 
after a great council of Buddhist priests and 
scholars, which he convened to discuss the mat- 
ter. This learned enthusiast from Harvard rep- 
resents the West in the East indeed, and with 
dignity. 

During the greater part of one's wanderings in 
India, one sees little, and how wise it is that this 
is so, of the armed men who are the real grip on 
India; but as you travel north you see the bow- 
string drawn tauter and tauter, until here at 
Peshawar it is ready to let fly the arrow at any 
moment of the day or night ; and from these fron- 
tier tribesmen themselves, is welded the arrow- 
head. 

It is easy to understand the British respect, 
and even reverence, for health and character and 
courage. They are the foundations of his su- 
premacy as a ruler at home, but particularly 
abroad. It is evident at once, out here, how 
useless is a weak man either physically or mor- 
ally. No amount of mental brilliancy would 
compensate for the lack of physical staying 
power. The Indians understand these qualities 



332 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

and trust them. The educated Indians have 
carried off many prizes in the way of intellectual 
feats of prowess, even at the English universities, 
and against the stoutest rivals, but they them- 
selves recognize that the world rests upon the 
bulk and steadiness of the elephant, rather than 
upon the cunning of the fox; or as the Chinese 
would say, upon the tortoise, which they claim 
is one of the nine offspring of the dragon, and 
the emblem of strength. 

Some of these dark people have the faces, and 
the port and carriage, of power; but it is hollow, 
the shadow of an inheritance not the real sub- 
stance. It is as though the masks of w^arriors 
and sages w^ere walking about untenanted. The 
character and power have become exhausted, 
leaving the husk of a great civilization gone to 
seed. 

The hospitality of these Englishmen knows no 
bounds. Despite his crowd of guests at this holiday 
season, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab 
takes us in at Lahore ; and the famous camel car- 
riage, drawn by six trotting camels harnessed in 
pairs, each pair wath a postilion, swings us away, 
soon after our arrival, at a good pace, to the polo 
ground. I have seen no polo anywhere, prob- 
ably no one else has, comparable to the polo 
played by our American team when they won the 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 333 

championship in London ; but on these hard In- 
dian grounds, mounted on thorough-bred ponies, 
the polo, played with sticks with whippier han- 
dles than ours, is an astonishing exhibition of 
speed. The Indian players, light and supple, 
seem to depend upon their wrists, and upon the 
resiliency of the shafts of their mallets, to send 
the ball along over the hard ground. The white 
and the brown play together. Here, as at home, 
the Englishman knows no class on the play- 
ground ; the only distinction made is between the 
straight and the crooked, the skilful and the 
awkward. 

It was here in Lahore that the British Em- 
pire's patriot poet, Kipling, began his work in the 
local newspaper office; and what I am now see- 
ing all over India, of the cheery, stout-hearted 
civil and military officers, bred in him that flavor 
of virility which he has distributed for the white 
man's encouragement around the world. 

The city was here before even Alexander the 
Great came ; was in its glory when the lieutenants 
of the Great Mughals w^ere its governors; was 
later the capital of the Sikh warriors, who gave 
the British the toughest resistance of all their 
fighting experiences in India, under their great 
commander Maharaja Ranjit Singh; and is now 
a city of two hundred thousand souls, living in 



334 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

a space of some five hundred acres, suiTounded 
by the remains of the old city wall. 

The Lieutenant-Governor mounts me upon his 
-elephant, for the narrow streets are too crowded 
for a carriage, and a foot-passenger would make 
his way but slowly; but ''My Lord the Ele- 
phant," with his bell hanging from his neck, his 
trunk swinging from side to side, his great bulk 
shuffled along on his cushioned feet, needs no 
police nor outriders to make way for him. He 
is himself bigger than many of the shops and 
houses, and from his howdah you may see all 
the layers of domestic life on both sides of the 
streets, from the squatting merchant on the level 
of the door-sill, to the women and children 
above, and the son training his carrier-pigeons 
on the roof. Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and 
Aurangzeb, all left monuments of their rule here; 
and when Shah Jahan was ruler in Delhi, and 
his Vizier, Wazir Khan, ruled in Lahore, were 
days of wealth and splendor; but the Sikh con- 
queror had no taste for these; he was, and is for 
that matter, a warrior, and most of the splendid 
monuments have crumbled and gone; and in 
their place are the broad avenues of the British 
residential quarters, with Government House, 
the English and Catholic cathedrals, and the 
fine buildings of the Aitchison College. 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 335 

How the Mughal rulers, or Alexander the 
Great, would have stared in bewilderment had 
they seen what I saw in Lahore! First, early 
one morning I accompanied the Lieutenant-Gov- 
ernor to the grounds of Aitchison College, and 
saw the ceremony of the laying of two corner- 
stones, one for a Hindu temple, the other for a 
Sikh Dharmsala. The Aitchison College is a 
sort of public school for the education of the 
sons of chiefs, and as Hindu and Sikh are both 
represented, both are encouraged to have tem- 
ples of their faith there. Later on that same 
morning, I was present at the opening of the first 
reform council, and heard the members sworn 
in and take the oath, some in the native language, 
but the majority in English. The reformed coun- 
cil here, as in other provinces of India, is a recent 
and far-reaching change, which permits a certain 
number of elected members, and also widens the 
scope of discussion to such an extent, that gov- 
ernors and lieutenant-governors will need the 
delicate diplomacy of skilful presiding oflScers, to 
expedite the business of their provinces. It is 
another burden, another demand for uncommon 
ability, and one wonders whether the breed of 
laborious archangels in Great Britain, is keep- 
ing up with the ever-increasing demands made 
upon it. 



336 THE LATEST IN THE EAST 

These things would have astonished Jahangir, 
but had he accompanied me to the prison, he 
would have been bewildered indeed. In La- 
hore is the central prison of the Punjab for long- 
sentence prisoners. It is situated in an airy, 
healthy spot, and its cleanliness and orderliness 
and air of comfort must make it a tempting place 
of residence, to natives accustomed to the village 
hut or the crowded bazaar. What a change 
from the dungeon, or a sack and the river; from 
the gibbet, or the crushing knees of an elephant, 
which were the swifter and surer methods of 
India's former rulers. 

The Aitchison Chiefs' College takes its name 
from a former lieutenant-governor, and is in- 
tended for the training of the sons of the princes 
and chiefs of the Punjab. The buildings are in a 
fine park, and there are playing fields, stables, and 
gymnasium, and dining-rooms and dormitories. 
There are some eighty boys there now, ranging in 
age from eight to seventeen. They get, with 
modifications, the training of an English public- 
school boy. Some of them were strikingly hand- 
some, with a look of breeding about them. They 
take to hockey, but not so well to the hurly-burly 
of foot-ball, the masters told me ; and as in sim- 
ilar institutions in the West, the results are good 
in some cases, indifferent in others. The corner- 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 337 

stone was only laid as lately as 1888, so that it is 
not fair, perhaps, to ask proof of the value of the 
college. India needs administrators, men who 
will devote themselves to the care and develop- 
ment of their own property, whether it be small 
or great; but the Indian Raja inclines to the 
military profession, and there he is shut off by 
the disinclination to let him rise to a grade where 
he would be given the task of commanding 
Europeans. This is one of the problems of ad- 
ministration in India: to know what to do with 
these young men, many of them wealthy and am- 
bitious, but who are barred from holding the 
higher offices to which their rank and their pref- 
erences lead them. 

The college; the swearing in of the reformed 
council; the prison; and the two temples side by 
side but of different faiths, are the monuments the 
British are setting up here, in the room of the 
mosques, and tombs, and palaces of dalliance, 
now in ruins, of their predecessors. 

I visited the Rajput College founded by the 
Maharaja of Jaipur; the college at Amritsar, 
where stands also the Golden Temple, the centre 
of Sikh worship; the Daly College at Indore; 
and the Anglo-Muhammadan College at Aligarh, 
founded by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who seems to 
have been a broad-church Muhammadan ; and the 



338 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

college I have just mentioned. The reason under- 
lying these foundations is broadly that the Indian 
youth, whether Rajput, Sikh, Muhammadan, or 
Hindu, may be trained as well as taught. In 
India, whatever the sect or caste, morality is based 
wholly upon religion; and bad as the results of 
education without religious teaching are proving 
themselves to be in the West, they are even worse 
in India. English rule to-day in India is suffer- 
ing as much from that one fatal error as from all 
other causes put together. India is offered a 
strange and unsettling education, without any 
safeguards of moral discipline; and the Universi- 
ties of Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Lahore, and 
Allahabad, which are mere examining bodies, 
with no provisions for moral or religious super- 
vision, have spawned the scurrilous garrulity of 
the native press, and the spurious patriotism of 
the political murderer. This secular education 
of a race physically and morally feeble is only 
producing talkers and plotters, not doers. Eng- 
land is compromising in this matter, and letting 
her conscience play the fool. She is thrusting a 
thin secular education upon the unprepared and 
unstable, and turning out by the score weak 
fanatics and silly, would-be tyrants. Even those 
picked bands, the Pilgrims and the Puritans, 
misunderstood freedom in the beginning, and set 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 339 

up a moral, religious, and social tyranny in New 
England almost unequalled in its severity. What 
is to be expected from the dregs of this washed- 
out Indian civilization, if such was the result 
among the very flower of the moral heroism of the 
seventeenth century! The Prince Agha Khan, 
who has succeeded Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as 
patron of the Muhammadan College at Aligarh, 
writes: "We want Aligarh to be such a home of 
learning as to command the same respect of 
scholars as Berlin or Oxford, Leipsic or Paris. 
Above all, we want to create for our people an 
intellectual and moral capital." This is ambi- 
tious, but it puts the emphasis where it belongs. 
We live together in our closely packed modern 
society, first by virtue of our similarity of actions, 
next by our similarity of moral ideals, and only 
last by our similarity of intellectual development 
and tastes. This means that self-control and 
moral discipline are to be taught first, and book- 
learning last. The ability to read and to write 
is such a modern accomplishment among the 
masses, that we point to it as the cross of salva- 
tion in the sky: by this shall you conquer! But 
it is only because it is an untried remedy. It is 
working untold evil among the superficially ed- 
ucated ; and even the man of letters is but a girlish 
personage, unless he escapes from the tyranny of 



340 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

books, and beats his learning into sword or 
ploughshare upon the rough anvil of the world of 
men. The freedom of libraries to the mentally 
unstable is as dangerous as the freedom of the 
city to the morally unsound ; and this littering of 
the land with libraries w^ill one day be looked 
upon not as a charity, but as a folly; and the 
liberty to do so will be as carefully restricted as 
the starting of national banks. 

But if we are to see anything of this many- 
shaded rainbow life of India, we may not halt too 
long over the discussion of these matters. We 
must be off now to pay visits to His Highness 
the Maharaja of Kapurthala, and His Highness 
the Maharaja of Patiala. We are whisked away 
from the station at Katarpur in motor-cars seven 
miles to Kapurthala, the State of some six hun- 
dred and fifty square miles, and three hundred 
thousand people, of a native prince, who has 
turned to France rather than to England, for his 
training and amusements. The guest-house is 
well furnished, lighted by electricity, supplied 
with open fires, and stands in a park of its own, 
not far from the palace. The palace where we 
dine in the evening is only just finished, built on 
a French model and furnished in the most luxu- 
rious and finished taste. It is much the finest 
modern building of its kind in India, and one of 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 341 

the finest in the world, and France may well be 
proud of this, her most imposing modern monu- 
ment in India. I took in to dinner the famous 
Spanish beauty, who is the Prince's lately mar- 
ried wife. The dinner was served in European 
fashion, wath one dish, a Kapurthala curry, that 
would have won praise from Brillat-Savarin him- 
self. If I were an Indian rival to the throne, des- 
tined to die, I should ask to have the diamond- 
dust given me in that curry. 

The next day, after a ride before breakfast, the 
stables, the law-courts, the treasury are visited, 
winding up with a presentation to, and a chat 
with, the Maharaja's council. In the afternoon 
we go to the palace for tea and tennis, and the 
Maharaja proves himself no mean opponent 
with the racquet. 

My host furnishes a regiment of infantry to the 
Imperial Service troops, and Colonel Asgar Ali, 
his commander-in-chief, gives me a rare treat the 
next day. We have a sham-fight. A distant 
village is to be taken, and next to fighting your- 
self, being umpire is the choice post. We gal- 
loped about for hours watching the men work, 
my companion suggesting and advising, the rifles 
popping away with blank cartridges, and finally 
a wild charge against the village defences, the 
call: "Cease firing"; and barring a few bruises. 



342 THE ATTEST IN THE EAST 

we start back, to the music of a first-rate drum 
and fife corps, none of us the worse, all of us the 
better, indeed, for the vigorous exercise. 

I suppose one could interest oneself in the ad- 
ministration of a small far-away State like this of 
Kapurthala, and keep oneself busy; but it is not 
a job the average Oriental cares for. All these 
States are to all intents and purposes insured by 
the British, which makes for irresponsibility in 
the rulers. Many of them lapse into dissipation, 
and long for the change travel in Europe affords. 
Few of them realize that luxury is the most un- 
comfortable thing in the world; indeed it is only 
a few intelligent men in the West, who have dis- 
covered it, and who strive to keep themselves 
hard, as a mere matter of daily comfort. 

Our own millionaires drape themselves in the 
costly artistic spoils of Europe, and cushion their 
women and themselves in over-ornamented pal- 
aces, breed a few forlorn spenders ; and one finds 
the frayed fringes of the third and fourth gene- 
rations strewn about the capitals of Europe, or 
comfortably potted in club windows at home. 
One should not be too hard upon the Oriental 
princes therefore. The inequalities of wealth are 
the more exasperating when they are new. Pos- 
sessors of wealth without traditions, and without 
responsibilities, and without distinguished mental 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 343 

or moral attributes, lend themselves easily to the 
onslaughts of the discontented, and of the social 
and economic fanatics. We must agree that 
mere spending power, unrelieved by grace or 
graciousness, is a vulgar thing, and not easy to 
defend; but one should not lose one's temper 
over it. The most salient feature of our Ameri- 
can life, to many on-lookers, seems to be our mil- 
lionaires. But look at their descendants ! Could 
there be a more ludicrous outcome of great en- 
deavor! The mountain and the mouse indeed! 

One is dismayed at the lack of healthy humor in 
Americans, that they do not see that the million- 
aire as an individual is almost more heavily han- 
dicapped than anybody else, so far as the perpet- 
uation of his power is concerned. The shirt- 
sleeves are hardly covered by a coat, the table- 
knife introduced to a fork, the illiteracy concealed 
by a layer of polite usages, before the descendants, 
fatuous, foul, or foolish, are on their way back to 
the shirt-sleeves, the unaccompanied knife, and 
the unformed manners, speech, and writing. This 
phase of our civilization calls not for spiteful envy, 
not even for laughter, though it is hard to re- 
press it, but for pity. At any rate it gives us no 
vantage-ground for criticism of the East. 

His Highness the Maharaja of Patiala, who 
governs a state of five thousand square miles in 



344 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

area, and a population of a million and a half, is 
one of the younger princes and only lately come 
to the throne. He had one wife before he came 
into power in October, 1909; since then he has 
exercised the privilege of his faith, and married 
two more. I arrived as his guest, in time to be 
present at a banquet given in the great Durbar 
Hall of his capital, in honor of the birthday of 
the Maharani. The hall was entirely lighted by 
more than two thousand candles, in huge glass 
candelabra twenty-five feet high. The meal was 
served in courses, by a small army of servants, 
and the very good native band played familiar 
European airs, and even one or two of our darky 
Southern songs, and played them well. Seated 
beside the Diwan, or minister of finance of His 
Highness, I asked whose birthday was being cel- 
ebrated and toasted, but even he did not know 
which one! There were of course no native 
women present. Here as elsewhere in India no 
woman of rank is supposed to show herself in 
public. Indeed it is the common custom among 
Hindus as well as among Muhammadans, as soon 
as a man has sufficient means to enable him to 
support the women of his family in idleness, to 
permit them, and the women themselves are 
more eager for it than the men, to adopt the Mu- 
hammadan custom of Purdah, to retire to the 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 345 

Zenana, or women's quarters, and only appear 
in public with the face covered. We have a sim- 
ilar custom in the West of keeping our women in 
idleness; but we exploit a startling amount of 
their persons, at public and private entertain- 
ments, as an ornamental compensation, I sup- 
pose, for their isolation from many forms of use- 
ful activity. That universal prayer-book of the 
West, the only prayer-book indeed loved and 
pondered over by both the pious and the proud, 
"The Imitation," says: *'Be not familiar with 
any woman; but commend all good women in 
general to God." 

An officer of the household drove me about 
the capital the next day, and showed me the Ma- 
haraja's jewels and treasury, and the great dia- 
mond valued at a quarter of a million of dollars. 
Though the Prince himself is a Sikh, this officer 
was a Mussulman, and claimed that the cleavage 
among the people of India, and the consequent 
racial jealousies, have increased since the Brit- 
ish domination. They have fostered these jeal- 
ousies, he said, that the resultant antagonisms 
may protect them. He agreed, as did every in- 
telligent man I met in India, for that matter, that 
India needs British rule, and respects British 
rule, but dislikes the arrogance, selfishness, and 
coldness of the Englishman. 



346 THE ^NEST IN THE EAST 

The State of Patiala supplies a force of nearly 
two thousand men to the Imperial Service troops, 
and one day they were marched out and put 
through their paces, and finally marched past 
for me to review. Young Prince Hitendra of 
Kooch Behar, who was also a guest at this time, 
and who had his string of polo ponies with him, 
mounted me on Straight Shot — one remembers 
the name even, of so good a mount as that — and 
we had a fine day with the troops. One may go 
far to find smarter light cavalry than these Sikh 
lancers of Patiala. A long row of lancers gal- 
loped up, dismounted, pulled their horses to the 
ground where they lay stock still. Another and 
then another galloped up behind and performed 
the same manoeuvre; as each man dismounted 
he lifted his horse's near fore-leg, then tightened 
the right rein, and down he went, and there he 
stayed without a motion ; looking carefully I saw 
not a single horse rebel. At the sound of a whis- 
tle they rose together, and were oS like a flight 
of birds. 

The next day I had another of the days in In- 
dia to be marked with a white stone. We were 
driven in motor-cars out to a wide plain, with 
clumps of trees dotted about, but the whole sur- 
rounded by dense woods. On our arrival we 
were greeted by what I took to be a whole vil- 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 347 

lage. There were elephants, camels, bullock- 
carts, five hundred mounted troops, and an army 
of beaters on foot. Their task was to form a ring 
around the wide open space, and to drive the 
wild boars out into the open. We mounted, I 
was given a long spear, and told briefly how to 
use it, and what dangers to avoid, and off we 
trotted : His Highness, one or two native officers, 
the Resident, Major Molyneux of the Imperial 
Service troops. Prince Hitendra, and I. 

I remember when I first saw fat pheasants, 
w^alking about in their preserve on a large estate 
in England, that I thought pheasant-shooting 
must be an easy game enough. I also remember 
that when I began shooting, as they came like 
bullets over the tree-tops, high in the air, that I 
revised completely my estimate of the skill re- 
quired in that sport. 

When you are mounted on a fast thorough-bred 
pony, with six feet of steel-pointed spear in your 
hand, and set out for the first time to go pig- 
sticking, you feel rather sorry for the pig. But 
when tw o or three hundred pounds of wild boar, 
with a hide like a rhinoceros, curling tusks, and 
muscles of wire and rawhide, shoots by in front 
of your galloping pony, turning, twisting, charg- 
ing across you, and even at you, here again the 
game in reality is far different from what your 
ignorance had pictured. 



348 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

It was not long before, blown, hot, and tired, 
I felt no compunction about sticking a pig, if I 
could get near one, and all sympathy was for my- 
self. To part company with your saddle, and to 
fall near these erinaceous brigands, is to be ripped 
from thigh to chin by their sharp tusks before 
there is time for rescue. This happens now and 
again, and probably if it did not happen no one 
would go pig-sticking. You think of that when 
you are still cold in the saddle; just as the stone 
walls, and mud fences, and ditches of Tipperary 
County, Ireland, seem formidable before you 
get warmed up, and then you either take them 
with your horse, or in a ''voluntary" without him, 
but never with much thought of their size. So 
too you forget their tusks, and thick hides, and 
their unparalleled ability to "buck the line," and 
their awe-inspiring dentition, when you have 
speared over, and under, one or two of these wild 
boars ; and you shut your teeth, and take another 
grip of your spear, and settle yourself more firmly 
in your saddle, and swoop down upon another 
boar scuttling away, as though his death were a 
patriotic demand, or the ideal of some high 
though ferocious standard of duty. 

I took things quietly at first, watching the old 
hands at the game, and then I tried my hand, 
once, twice, three times, and failed. It was no 
fault of the pony who followed these bristling. 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 349 

dodging, and ferocious polo balls as though they 
were only wooden; he knew the game well 
enough, and perhaps deserves more credit than I 
for the pig I finally brought down. 

As I am telling the story, I might properly 
enough enlarge upon this pig, as he was the first 
and last, and probably the only one, I shall ever 
spear. He was not one of the largest killed that day, 
but he was the only one that went down from one 
spear thrust, not to rise again. He ought to have 
had the spear behind the shoulder, but he got it 
behind the left ear; like so many neophytes I ap- 
peared more skilful than I was. At this game the 
man who gets his spear into the pig first is by 
courtesy his slayer, but it is rare that one, or even 
half a dozen spear thrusts, are enough. They 
keep going until the steel reaches a vital part, and 
they give and take no quarter. His Highness 
presented me with my spear at the close of the 
day's sport, and both spear and boar's head are 
here to look up at on the wall as years go by; and 
by the time the grandchildren are old enough 
to ask what it is, that boar will have grown to be 
a very large, and a very fierce boar indeed ! When 
we returned to the motor-cars we found a large 
square tent carpeted with rugs, furnished with 
chairs and tables, and a hot luncheon ready for 
us. Tents go up and come down in India as 



350 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

easily apparently as we open and shut an um- 
brella. 

But that is but a Tent wherein may rest 
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest; 

The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash 
Strikes and prepares it for another guest. 

The Imperial Service troops date from 1888, 
when the native chiefs offered to share in the de- 
fence of the Empire. The irregular and undis- 
ciplined forces of the native states were organ- 
ized into smaller bodies, to be trained under the 
supervision of British officers, who now number 
twenty-one. The strength of these bodies of 
troops amounts to twenty thousand men of whom 
two thousand eight hundred belong to the trans- 
port trains. The polo-playing and horse-loving 
Maharaja of Jodhpur furnishes a regiment of 
lancers; the desert state of Bikaner, a camel- 
corps which has seen service in Africa and China ; 
I spent a morning looking over the train of trans- 
port carts of the Jaipur state; Kapurthala fur- 
nishes infantry, and Patiala light cavalry ; and all 
of these corps are officered and commanded by 
men of their own neighborhood, with the Maha- 
raja in each case as commander-in-chief. 

Once a year the athletic contingents from these 
corps come together for the annual athletic meet- 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 351 

ing. The meeting of 1910 was held in the native 
state of Her Highness Sultan Begum, the present 
Nawab of Bhopal, who rules over an area of 
seven thousand square miles and a population 
of six hundred and seventy thousand. It was 
through the good offices of Major-General F. 
H. R. Drummond, the hard-working Inspector- 
General of these Imperial Service troops, that I 
was invited by Her Highness to be her guest 
during the week. Her Highness, and Queen 
Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, are the only 
women ruling States in the world to-day. Far 
apart as are the Muhammadan Begum and the 
Protestant Queen, they are equally respected 
and beloved. My crust of provincial ignorance 
was badly cracked, when at my first interview 
with the Begum, covered from head to foot, and 
with only the shine of her eyes visible through 
the two slits in her head-covering, she discussed 
with me the comparative value of tutors, schools, 
or kindergarten methods for her grandchildren; 
and on the other hand averred solemnly that 
the illness of one of her sons was undoubtedly 
due to the comet, of which there was much talk 
at the time. She had made the pilgrimage to 
Mecca and when her party was attacked in the 
desert, by a roving band of Arabs, she took com- 
mand of her own forces and drove off the attack- 



352 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ing party with loss to them. I was presented 
with several volumes written by her, with her 
autograph on the title-pages; and the census, 
and the vital and other statistics of her State are 
admirably compiled, as the volume before me as 
I write confirms. 

To arrive at your host's railway station after 
midnight is awkward for both host and guest as 
a rule ; but not so here. Hundreds of troops, and 
their officers, and forty to fifty European guests 
were received and taken care of for this w^eek; 
and when I appeared upon the platform at Bho- 
pal, I was at once taken in charge by an officer, 
who handed me an addressed envelope, telling 
me where my quarters were, the hours for meals, 
the times of the arrival and departure of mails 
and trains, and a programme of the week's do- 
ings and entertainments. The Germans could 
not have done it better. I was undeservedly 
honored by having luxurious quarters in the 
bungalow of the Inspector- General. 

It was a jolly crowd of officers and their wives 
when we met at luncheon and dinner ; but it was 
a hard-worked lot of men who supervised, um- 
pired, and directed the sports, which went on 
hour after hour from daylight till dark. Polo, 
hockey, running-races, broad and high jumping, 
obstacle races, and exercises on the horizontal 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 353 

and parallel bars, and other games and sports 
were included in the programme. When it is 
considered that the track was by no means as per- 
fect as ours, these records are not bad : Hundred 
yards, lOf seconds; mile, 4:50| minutes; three 
miles, 15:45f minutes; high jump, 5 ft. 4 in. 
As for the obstacle race, it was the severest test 
of the kind I have ever seen or heard of. It in- 
cluded among other things rope-climbing, in and 
out of the windows of a house, a terrible bit of arti- 
ficial jungle, a tent to go through, a wooden wall 
fifteen feet high, abroad and deep water-jump, and 
a long run home. I doubt if our best men at this 
game would have a chance against these Indians. 

There are men from as far north as Kashmir, 
and men from the south, east, and west, and you 
realize the vastness, and the differences of races 
of India, when you see them here together. Ev- 
erything goes smoothly, not a hitch that I saw; 
but it must entail a tremendous amount of work 
for the British officers, who train the men, super- 
intend the meeting, teach fair-play, and whose 
cheery authority keeps the peace, without which 
there would surely be a dozen riots a day between 
these rival bands of different races. 

On the last afternoon of the games Her High- 
ness presented the prizes, and great was the ap- 
plause as the various winners appeared. When 



354 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

the winning polo team was called, there was some 
delay and running about, and at last only two of 
the four presented themselves. I learned after- 
wards that the other two were at their prayers 
when they w^ere called, and refused to be dis- 
turbed even by this great honor of receiving prizes 
from a Muhammadan ruler. Some of us perhaps 
take our devotions thus seriously, but not many, 
I fear! 

On the last day of the meeting we were in- 
vited to the palace for a garden-party, and enter- 
tained with music, shooting at clay pigeons, at a 
target with the rifle, a sumptuous tea, and pre- 
sented when w^e left with gold and silver tissue 
garlands hung round our necks by the hostess, 
and atta and pan, the mark of Oriental courtesy, 
consisting of sweetmeats and the sprinkling of 
our handkerchiefs w4th perfume. After our final 
dinner the Begum drove over with an escort of 
lancers, and read us a graceful little speech of 
congratulation and farewell. 

The next visit to Colonel Daly, the Resident in 
charge of the native chiefs of central India, at 
Indore, brought the unique pleasure of finding 
that my hostess was an American. This proved 
a busy centre of activity, and I had the good fort- 
une to arrive in time for a meeting of the native 
chiefs, interested in the building and management 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 355 

of the Daly Chiefs' College, named after the 
present Resident's father. The masters are care- 
fully chosen from the English public schools and 
universities; and here too they are bulwarking 
education, with training by example, in character 
and self-discipline. 

The energetic physician of this district, with his 
hospitals, dispensaries, training-school for nurses, 
bacteriological laboratory, and his students, made 
the remark, which I quote as conveying by an apt 
illustration my own general impression of Indian 
intellectual ability. "The Indian students are 
quick and clever," he said; "they have memory. 
If told a man has pneumonia, they can rattle 
off the symptoms, but if told certain symptoms, 
they cannot as readily name the disease. They 
are poor diagnosticians." They lack the cour- 
age which welcomes responsibility, and the con- 
fidence which names because it knows, here as 
in other departments in which they serve. The 
Englishmen are the real vertebrse of India, and 
you see it well illustrated here at Indore, at Bho- 
pal, and elsewhere. 

The Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar Bahadur of 
Indore, a neighbor of Colonel Daly, gave me a 
day's shooting for black buck; and I have a 
twenty-one inch head as a companion for the 
wild boar from Patiala. But it is terribly hot on 



356 THE W^EST IN THE EAST 

the plains around Indore where the black buck 
roam. Owing to the fact that a rifle went wTong, 
and kept missing fire, I was delayed and did the 
bulk of my hunting between the hours of eleven 
and two. First a motor-car took me out to the 
plains, there the Maharaja's shikari met me with 
ponies, and after a few miles on the ponies we 
mounted a bullock-cart, which is less likely to 
frighten the game. First the rifle missed, and 
then I missed. Finally a sei^ant went off and 
returned with a rifle of the Maharaja, and a per- 
fect little weapon it was. I had tired myself, and 
probably the shikari, when a buck leaped in the 
air, and with a second shot dropped. The first 
shot had merely taken a bit of hide off the top of 
his shoulders, and as he sprang into the air the 
second went through his heart. As in the case of 
the boar, I had better luck than my skill deserved, 
for the buck had practically jumped into that 
second bullet. They are quick, and shy, and 
small, these animals, and like so many other 
games it looks a lot easier than it is 

At a garden-party given for the chiefs the next 
afternoon I saw a variety of costumes, a wealth 
of color, and a procession of old-fashioned man- 
ners and customs in the persons of the chiefs. 
One fine-looking old fellow I can see now. His 
whiskers were curled around his ears, a jade- 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 357 

handled knife was in his belt, and he was followed 
wherever he went by three servitors, one carrying 
his hookah, another his sword, and the third his 
gun. He maintained the state of a time when 
every man went armed ; just as we still have two 
buttons on our coats, at the small of the back, 
which are merely the relics of the time when our 
fathers buttoned back their coat-tails that they 
might both walk and draw their swords more 
easily. Other chiefs more modern in costume and 
manner played tennis ; some were poor, while one 
of them. Colonel Maharaja Sir Madho Rao Sind- 
hia, governs the state of Gwalior, twenty-nine 
thousand square miles in area, with a popula- 
tion of three million five hundred thousand, and 
with revenues of four or five millions of dollars. 
He is one of the richest, as he is one of the 
most conscientious and hard-working princes in 
India. My next visit, of only two days, was to 
him. 

Neither space nor the interest of my readers per* 
mit detailed descriptions of this and other visits. 
I shall never forget, how^ever, the magnificent 
creature who was detailed to meet me at the sta- 
tion at Gwalior. He was a good-looking man to 
begin with, of slender build and medium height. 
His coat was a tight-fitting affair of pale pink 
silk, shot with blue, his trousers were skin-tight 



358 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

and of white linen. A gold-embroidered waist- 
coat showed at his throat, and around his neck was 
a string of uncut emeralds, all of a size, and each 
as big as a pigeon's egg. Around his wrists were 
strings of large diamonds, and hanging from the 
top of his right ear were three pear-shaped pearls. 
He wore the turban peculiar to Gwalior, of scar- 
let with a peak in the centre of gold-threaded em- 
broidery, and sewn with jewels. What a sight a 
great Durbar in India must be when these hun- 
dreds of princes and their escorts, all in their 
bravest costumes, march past on elephants and 
horses! Millions of value in embroideries, in 
jewels, in horse and elephant harness, some of 
the elephants even, with bangles of precious 
stones, silver horn cases for the bullocks, and 
gold-embroidered cloths; howdahs of gold and 
silver, and gold and silver cannons even; what 
barbaric splendor it must be! It was dazzling 
enough to have here and there such glimpses of 
it as I had. 

They were very differently clothed, were the 
next gentlemen who entertained me. Colonel 
Deare, and the officers of the Eighth Hussars, out 
for a week of exercise at manoeuvres, with other 
troops in their dusty khaki uniforms, living in 
tents, and in the saddle from dawn till dark, 
were smart enough in their mess dress at dinner; 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 359 

but they were more useful-looking tlian orna- 
mental when at work. Those were glorious days 
to me, galloping about, and watching the various 
arms of the service, artillery, cavalry, and in- 
fantry, native and European, at work together. 
Who would not be a cavalryman, when two 
hundred of them dash from an ambush across 
the plains, and sw^oop down upon the guns ; or a 
gunner, w4ien they gallop up, swing around, un- 
limber the guns, and begin pounding away; or an 
infantryman prone on the ground ready to blaze 
into a line of fire when the enemy is near enough, 
or on his feet, bayonet fixed, w^aiting for the w^ord 
to charge ! It is these few moments in the life of 
the fighting man w hich make him forget the drab 
dreariness of hunger, and thirst, and exposure, 
and wounds, and heat, and cold, and prison, 
and death, which, after all, make up the warp 
and woof of war; those shining minutes of ex- 
citement are only the scant embroidery of the 
cloth. 

They are a sensible race, these Britons! It 
was hard work, and dusty, thirsty work they w^ere 
doing, and there was no saving of themselves 
while doing it; but every comfort that health re- 
quires they had in their camp; and though my 
taste in such matters may be at fault, I was never 
happier during all my stay in India than when 



360 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

I was living under canvas, with civil or military 
officials; roasting if you please at mid-day, and 
freezing at midnight; but with just that combina- 
tion of hardship and comfort which keeps a man, 
a man ; and neither a boor on the one hand, nor 
a mollycoddle on the other. 

I trotted back into Lucknow, through the 
crowded streets of the bazaars, to be greeted by 
some days of excitement very different from the 
sober discipline of the military camp. An un- 
usual number of police were about, drawn from 
th^ country districts, and I soon saw that they 
were not there without reason. It was the sea- 
son of the Mussulman festival of Muharram. 

There are two principal sects of Islam, the 
Sunis and the Shiahs. The Shiahs are the less 
numerous, and the head-quarters of the sect are 
in Persia. Lucknow, once the capital of the 
Nawabs of Oudh, still celebrates the festival as 
an occasion for marking the distinction, because 
these Nawabs were of the Shiah sect, and the 
Shiahs are still more numerous and powerful 
here than in any other part of India. 

The first three successors of Muhammad were 
selected by the faithful without regard to the 
claims of Ali, his son-in-law; and Ali only suc- 
ceeded to the fourth vacancv. The two sons of 
Ali, Hassan and Hussain, were killed by a rival, 



A VISITOR'S DIARY S61 

fighting bravely at the battle of Kerbela. The 
sect of the Sunis accept the first three; but the 
sect of the Shiahs reject them, and look upon the 
two sons of All as the great martyrs of their faith. 
They were preparing to commemorate this mar- 
tyrdom when I returned to Lucknow. When 
the day came the whole city, as it seemed to me, 
turned itself into a procession. Shrines made of 
paper, bamboo and tinsel, some small, carried by 
a single person ; others huge affairs, carried by a 
dozen men, were borne along, the crowd march- 
ing far out into the country, where these shrines 
were solemnly interred. Various features of the 
tragic history of the death of Hassan and Hussain 
are represented during the procession and at the 
interment; and every now and again the proces- 
sion halted, while an excited orator rehearsed 
some portion of the story. They marched, shout- 
ing the names of the martyrs, beating their 
breasts, throwing dust on their heads, they are 
all bareheaded on this occasion, weeping and 
wailing. One group carried what looked like 
short flails, and to the ends of the cords were tied 
knife-blades; these they whirled around their 
heads, bringing them down on their shoulders 
and backs, which were streaming with blood. 

This was not a procession of boys, or of hyster- 
ical youths and women, but of grown men, many 



362 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

of whom were pointed out to me as men of stand- 
ing in the community. To see a group of these 
men stop, and burst into groans, tears, and wild 
cries of grief; to see their breasts bruised, and in 
some cases the skin broken, by the beating from 
their fists; to see them covered with blood, dust, 
and sweat, their faces haggard, their eyes blazing 
with excitement; to hear one of them recite part of 
the tale of woe, his eyes streaming with tears and 
his voice choked with emotion ; and the tale punc- 
tuated with wild cries and shrieks and lusty pum- 
melling of the breast on the part of his hearers, 
while little children and old women threw dust 
on their own and each other's heads, is the most 
amazing spectacle of religious enthusiasm that 
one may see anywhere in the world to-day. This 
is the kind of man, this is the quality of human 
stuff, which spread like lava over Arabia, Egypt, 
Spain, up to the very gates of France, and burst 
through the Afghan passes and conquered India. 
One readily understands why. Apparently the 
faith is still alive, sincere, and as ready for the 
torch to light it against the infidel as ever. They 
abhor pig, insist upon the rite of circumcision, 
ignore the bondage of caste, and with sword and 
crescent crumpled up almost the whole of the 
fighting world at one time, declaring : there is one 
God, Muhammad is his prophet, and we are the 



A VISITOR'S DIARY 363 

chosen people, with a paradise of delights await- 
ing us as a recompense for our slaughter of the 
infidel and the idolater. 

One in every five of the population of India is 
a Mussulman, and the British King-Emperor 
rules over more Mussulmans than even the Sultan 
of Turkey. This frenzied crowd is tuned up to a 
delicate pitch of excited sectarianism; and their 
rivals the Sunis, and the Hindus, generally offer 
cause for fighting before the day is over; and 
sometimes, as lately in Bombay, actual riots, 
which call for the intervention of the police and 
the shooting of the rioters. It is hard to believe 
that these men, cutting their backs with knives, 
and beating their breasts to a pulp with their fists, 
over a question of Caliphic succession a thousand 
years old, are the fathers and brothers and cous- 
ins of the cricket-playing students at Aligarh. 
It is hard to believe that those worshippers in the 
gloomy temple at Benares are in any way related 
to the distinguished and learned judge in the 
court at Bombay. It is hard to believe that those 
catechists crowding into the Golden Temple at 
Amritsar are cousins of the Sikh ruler who knows 
his Paris better than most Parisians ; harder still 
to reconcile the facts that the pink pasteboard 
uniformity of Jaipur, and the tawdry architect- 
ural decadence of Lucknow, are phases of the 



364 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

same civilization which built the Pearl Mosque 
at Delhi, the Taj at Agra, the great red sandstone 
fort of Akbar, and the town of Fatehpur-Sikri. 
Only India has the right to be called the land of 
contrasts. 



IX 

JOHN CHINAMAN AND OTHERS 

IF the only impressions of India one carried 
away were received on entering India as the 
guest of the Governor of Bombay, and on 
leaving India as the guest of the Viceroy at Cal- 
cutta, and during the six months between as the 
guest of English and Indian oiEcials and poten- 
tates, the American would have only a tale to 
tell of wonders and splendors, and of a hospitality 
as kindly as it was brilliant. 

But India is a land of ** braided light and 
gloom." Close beside the beautiful temple are 
creatures fantastically deformed; there are no 
such exotically magnificent princes, and no such 
millions living from hand to mouth; no mortal 
succeeds as does the Indian Yogi, who has ac- 
quired Yoga or union with the Divinity, in di- 
vorcing body and soul, and no other land has 
such a swarm, estimated at five million, of beg- 
gars; there is no such practical exponent of 
peace as the orthodox Jain, no such ruflSan as the 
untrained Bhil; there is no land, I believe, gov- 

365 



366 THE \\T5ST IN THE EAST 

erned by such self-sacrificing rulers, and ruling 
over such ignorant multitudes; there is no land 
where you may see a picked man of our race, 
soldier, sportsman, administrator, the best we 
have produced in short in the matter of man- 
hood, and beside him our best expression of 
dignified womanhood; and not far away an 
Indian fakir naked, painted, covered with dust 
and vermin, illustrating the disorderliness of 
fanatical ignorance. 

I had had some six months of this "braided 
light and gloom" when I arrived at Calcutta as 
the guest of the Viceroy who had had five years 
of it. The Viceroy and the Governors of prov- 
inces are not permitted to leave India during their 
term of office, and five years of Indian climate 
and Indian responsibility is killing work. If 
there be faults and mistakes in the administra- 
tion of India, India has taken toll in the health 
and lives of those who have governed her. Lord 
Minto has not taken his duties lightly, and I 
can fancy that he looks back upon his daring 
feats as a horseman, as to the risks of the nur- 
sery, compared to his burdens as Viceroy of 
India. 

Fast mail steamers and the telegraph, and a 
fussy Secretary of State for India, and back of 
him the ignorant prying of representatives who 



JOHN CHINAMAN 367 

wish his administration no good, may make a 
present-day governor the most governed man in 
the whole dependency he is supposed to govern. 
England has produced many men and still pos- 
sesses a few, who decline to be governed gov- 
ernors. That type of man founded, fought for, 
freed, and made both England and America 
what they are. You have only to walk about 
Calcutta to see that England has, however un- 
willingly, let it be known that the unlearned, the 
untra veiled, the superjBcial are in control at 
home. Though the working man, why he arro- 
gates to himself that title I am always at a loss 
to understand, may be getting even more than 
his rights at home, his short-sighted shrewdness 
there, may be losing him his markets abroad. 
Indeed, that is what is actually happening. 
They are even now grinding Manchurian wheat 
with Chinese labor at Woosung. A steamship 
line carries pig-iron from the Yellow River to 
Seattle; and they are making shoes at Cawn- 
pore with American machinery. Both Peking 
and Mukden are to have a water supply. They 
are getting on! 

Coming as I did from the north of India, the 
scarcely veiled impudence, the assertion of 
equality and independence, the ugly temper of 
the Bengali were not only evident, they were ob- 



368 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

trusive in Calcutta. Here you see the ullage of 
the cask of India, and it is gaseous as might be 
expected, and ever ready to be touched into ex- 
plosiveness. 

There can be nothing more dangerous in deal- 
ing with a population such as this, than to give 
the impression that the man sent to rule has a 
string tied to him, which may be jerked from 
London. I have no means of knowing whether 
this supposition is true or not true; but that it 
is firmly believed by the Indian politicians and 
their followers there is no doubt; and that it puts 
the ruler in a cruelly embarrassing position goes 
without saying. Lord Minto's administration 
has nevertheless persisted in reforms, persisted 
in the optimistic view, and resisted the tempta- 
tion to panicky repression; but that is because 
Lord Minto himself is a brave man. 

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the Indian 
only recognizes readily power that is autocratic 
and personified in one man. When that power 
is interfered with from unknown sources it con- 
fuses him, and his violence is as often as not 
the result of his confusion. If the British Gov- 
ernment does not trust the viceroy sufficiently 
to let him alone, the Indians will go still further, 
as they have done, and throw stones at his motor- 
car, and then bombs at himself and his wife, and 



JOHN CHINAMAN 369 

the six hundred members of Parliament are 
more to blame than the three hundred millions 
of India. If one reads Morley's " Life of Burke," 
with its bitter attacks upon Clive and Hastings, 
one may find therein, though it be far distant, not 
a little light thrown upon certain phases of recent 
Indian administration. I can speak with au- 
thority only upon one matter. Of the hospital- 
ity dispensed at Government House, and at Bar- 
rackpur, the country residence of the Viceroy, I 
may write with the pleasantest memories; and 
in candor rather than in compliment one must 
congratulate the English people that they have a 
woman to send abroad, as the consort of the 
representative of their king, so queenly in man- 
ner and appearance, as their representative who 
was my hostess in Calcutta. 

Calcutta with its million inhabitants, its large 
seaport trade, its public buildings, fine clubs, 
and beautiful race-course, perhaps the best- 
equipped in the world, even the garden-party I 
attended, given by the Lieutenant-Governor, with 
the variety of costumes and races assembled 
there, proved to me how soon the eye becomes 
dulled and the interest languorous. I had seen 
so much, that Calcutta seemed commonplace, 
though I know well that it is not. What the 
experienced Anglo-Indians, on the ship which 



370 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

carried us to India, told me of Bombay, and 
which my unaccustomed eyes found to be quite 
untrue, in Bombay, I experienced in Calcutta. 
The strange features and figures, the moving 
mass of color were dulled by the film of ex- 
perience which had grown over my eyes. It 
may be too that months of travel, where both 
mind and body are travelling, and where the 
experiences are novel and the contrasts so strik- 
ing; where one shifts from a palace to a tent, 
and from philosophy to pig-sticking all within 
a few hours, teach the impression-receiving parts 
of mind and body to defend themselves by be- 
coming more opaque. It was almost with a sigh 
of relief that I dropped into my deck-chair early 
one morning on the steamer, on my way to 
Rangoon. 

On the road to Mandalay, 

Where the flyin '-fishes play. 
An' the dawn comes up like thunder, outer' 

China 'cros't the bay. 

It is getting on toward April, and the moist 
heat, even lolling on the deck of a moving 
steamer, makes pulp of a man ; only the mosqui- 
toes make him realize his manhood. Mosquitoes 
have their place in the world. It is their func- 
tion to prove to man that no discomfort is com- 



JOHN CHINAMAN 371 

plete without them. I was even too lackadaisi- 
cal to do more than to smile weakly, when the 
menu of the first day's luncheon informed me 
that the only hot dish was grilled pork chops, 
British gastronomies undefiled! Add to this 
kind of fare the mental pabulum of a loquacious 
and facetious skipper, and you have a ship 
which christens herself the "Emetic," whatever 
her name registered at Lloyd's may be. 

Whether it was because I had just left the 
sombreness of India, the contrast with Burma 
was all in Burma's favor. I have chatted with 
Indians who laughed and joked, with others who 
had a certain dreamy humor, but India as a 
whole, as a composite, leaves the impression of 
being solemn and sullen. There is more laugh- 
ter and gayety in Rangoon in one afternoon than 
in all India in a week. The Burmese are the 
Parisians of the East. As I look back from a 
distance, India seems sober even to sullenness; 
Burma gay and bright; Japan eager, curious, 
superficial; and the Chinese, strange to say, 
though proud and indifferent, the forceful and 
competent people of the East. Sir Robert Hart 
writes of them: "Pride of race, pride of intel- 
lect, pride of civilization, pride of supremacy, 
in its massive and magnificent setting of bliss- 
ful ignorance." Once they break through this 



372 THE W^ST IN THE EAST 

shell of satisfied ignorance, and take to modern 
methods of agriculture, commerce, and warfare, 
the East will come into her own again indeed. 
Just now, we are hearing much of Asia for the 
Asiatics, with Japan in control of the movement. 
The little boy Japan may have this huge yel- 
low puppy at the end of a string now, but there 
will be some awful tumbles for him w^hen the 
puppy grows up. 

The Chinese are very much in evidence where- 
ever one goes, all the way round the coast from 
Calcutta via Rangoon, Penang, Singapore, Hong- 
kong, and as far east and north as the borders 
of Russian Asia. He is industrious, often pros- 
perous, sometimes rich. Here in Burma he is 
a favorite in the matrimonial market, as he is 
all through the East. He may not appeal to 
us as a lady's man exactly, but he is greatly 
fancied by the Burmese, and the women all 
through the Straits Settlements and elsewhere. 
He supports his wife w^hich is considered a negli- 
gible duty by both the Burmese and the Malays. 
In Rangoon with a population of 230,000 there 
are 77,000 Hindus, 40,000 Muhammadans, and 
some 15,000 Chinese. Like the Parsis in Bom- 
bay they seem much more numerous than they 
are. Certain races have the faculty of multiply- 
ing their visibility. It is almost impossible to 



JOHN CHINAIVIAN 373 

believe that there are less than a million Jews in 
America, and less than eleven million in all the 
world; and much the same is true of the Parsis 
in India. By their industry, their clannishness, 
their pre-eminence in all matters dealing with 
money, their facility in adapting themselves 
to the rapid changes in the financial and com- 
mercial temperature, they have won for them- 
selves a prominence out of all proportion to their 
numbers. The Chinese emigrants in Burma 
and elsewhere in the Far East show something 
of the same qualities. They are the money- 
changers, and the trusted handlers of money 
in the banks, offices, and commercial houses 
throughout the Far East, and even to a limited 
extent in Japan. 

There is no caste system, no seclusion of the 
women in Burma, and they seem a happy, lazy, 
color-loving lot, short and thick-set in build, with 
a certain flatness of feature that marks their 
kinship to the Mongolian. The men wear their 
hair long, and are without hair on their faces; 
and the women are shopkeepers and are seen 
everywhere, in the streets and bazaars and at 
the temples, free and busy, and judging from 
their expression, light-hearted, marking a change 
and making a change in the street life, from that 
of India, as from beetles to butterflies. 



374 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Every civilization in the East is old as we 
mark the passage of time, but as compared with 
the others, India seems rather aged than old. 
These merry people in Burma, the busy people 
in Japan, the industrious and cheerful Chinese, 
all seem young by comparison. In this rich soil 
and overwhelming vegetation, in this land of 
jade and amber and rubies and teak-wood, with 
its twenty million acres of forests of all kinds 
of valuable hard-woods, with its eleven thousand 
acres of rice fields, getting a living is not a diflB- 
cult matter; and the Burmese men, at any rate, 
scorn superfluous industry. 

Here too is the home of Buddhism, pagodas 
and monasteries are everywhere, and so far as my 
experience goes, everywhere the monks are aflFa- 
ble and hospitable. To build a new pagoda is 
a charity deemed by the Burmese to be an act 
more sure of reward in the future life than any 
other; while to repair an old pagoda carries no 
weight at all with those who mete out salva- 
tion. As a consequence pagodas with their 
fringes of bells, and their umbrella tops, dot 
every hillside and every conspicuous bit of land- 
scape. 

Every Burmese is supposed to shave his head, 
don the saffron-colored robe, and become a 
monk for a certain time, which accounts for the 



JOHN CHINAMAN 375 

very youthful appearance and the rather merry 
holiness of many of the neophytes whom I met. 
The monks are supported by the voluntary 
contributions of the people, and in return they 
constitute themselves the school-teachers of the 
land. The monasteries are as a rule built upon 
piles, and are always of one story, since it is con- 
sidered derogatory to a priest that any one shall 
live above him. I was told that the population 
is more superstitious than Buddhistic in feeling. 
The spirits of rivers, mountains and forests, 
called NatSy are continually and carefully propi- 
tiated by most of the people who, not differing 
greatly from disciples of what are deemed higher 
forms of religion, are more conspicuous in their 
loyalty to the powers that be, than obedient to 
the mandates of the unseen and distant. We 
might ourselves conceive of the powers of nature 
as worthy of worshipful reverence if we lived in 
Rangoon, where the rainfall averages ninety 
inches per annum. 

The good folk of Boston may be disturbed to 
learn that in the palace at Mandalay there is a 
high seven-storied gilded spire over the throne, 
which the Burmese claim is the centre of the 
universe, or d*7r<l>a\o^ yrj^, as they would phrase 
it in Boston. Not being a Bostonian, I made 
no comment, but I make no doubt the Burmese 



376 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

would recognize the absurdity of their pretension 
if the rival claim were properly presented. 

What Taine wrote of certain of the gaudier 
churches of Italy: ''Des casinos a Y usage des 
cervelles imaginatives," is not a mere rhetorical 
slur, but a better description than any that I 
can give of these pagoda temples of Burma. 
While in Rangoon I spent most of my time in 
the bazaars and in the precincts of the great 
Shwe Dagon Pagoda, Monks, nuns, priests, 
shopkeepers, jugglers, peddlers and pilgrims 
were coming and going there all day. No ca- 
sino in Europe can show a greater variety of 
visitors. This pagoda is said to contain actual 
relics of Buddha, and pilgrims come from all 
over the Eastern world, from India, Siam, Korea, 
to worship here. I saw Hindus, Siamese, Jap- 
anese, Koreans, Chinese there, all in one morn- 
ing; and the sick and diseased carried in chairs 
and litters, from what far-off regions I know not, 
were there too. It was almost painful to see the 
excitement, the awe, the scared expression on the 
faces of some of the pilgrims, as they made their 
way slowly, and with frequent obeisances, tow- 
ard the shrine; while others listen with wonder 
in their eyes, as a guide describes glibly the 
meaning of the frescoes on the beams and panels 
of the wooden roofs, which cover the long stairs. 



JOHN CHINAMAN 377 

They have not been weaned from an abject 
belief in God in the East, and I am not sure that 
this is not the real cleavage between us. There 
must be a mighty difference between the races 
who believe in God and the races who invent 
Him. 

If the reader will look at a map, he will see 
that the Bay of Bengal, which is a part of the 
Indian Ocean really, which reaches up between 
Ceylon and India on the west, and the Straits 
Settlements, Siam and Burma on the east, has 
two ports, Ceylon and Singapore, at each end 
roughly of the surrounding land. These two 
ports are the switch-boards for all the going and 
coming between East and West. Ten thousand 
vessels, with a tonnage of over ten million tons, 
come and go here at Singapore in a year, and 
some fifteen thousand native craft besides. 
Bound north or south, east or west, you start 
from, or change, or call in passing, at Ceylon or 
at Singapore, and if it be Singapore, as in my 
case, when you get there you can almost step off 
on to the equator. 

Wliy that imaginary line attracts so much at- 
tention is hard to explain. Twice when I have 
crossed it, we were all eager to know just when 
we should cross, as though we expected a bump 
or jar of some sort; and the passengers on the 



378 THE \^^ST IN THE EAST 

Tara which carried us from Rangoon to Singa- 
pore seemed to feel that nearness to the equator 
added in some way to one's dignity. 

To those who only read of the plague as a de- 
vouring monster too distant for menace to one- 
self, it is startling to be obliged to appear before 
a doctor for examination before embarking, and 
to be threatened with a heavy fine by the au- 
thorities at Singapore, if one fails to appear regu- 
larly each day, for a certain number of days, to 
assure the health officer that one is not carrying 
about the germs of disease. Evidently warnings 
were out all along the coast, that the monster 
was preparing for the outbreak, which some six 
months later began its ravages in Manchuria. 
Even a strong man looks at his tongue, feels his 
pulse, watches his appetite for those few days of 
examination, with absorbing and anxious in- 
terest. 

At Singapore with its two hundred and thirty 
thousand inhabitants, of whom all but some ten 
thousand are Asiatics, one touches the fringe of 
China and the Chinese. The area of China is 
one-third the whole of Asia and half as large 
again as all Europe, and the population of 
China is half that of all Asia and about equal 
to the total population of Europe. No wonder 
they spill over all along these coasts, and the 



JOHN CHINAMAN 379 

traveller realizes that the Chinese are a migratory 
people, and so far as one can see a welcome ad- 
dition to the working population everywhere. 

There are large communities of Chinese at 
Cholen, Penang, Singapore, Bangkok, Hong- 
kong, and at Rangoon, Mandalay, Batavia, and 
Manila. They become not only the shop- 
keepers and retailers, but they manage steam- 
ships, own mines and mills, and even supply cap- 
ital for joint-stock companies. There are more 
Chinese than Malays in the Malay States; there 
are some three millions of them in Siam; they 
are the preponderating power in French Cochin- 
China and Tonking, and out of a population 
of 320,000 in Hongkong 310,000 are Chinese; 
while in the Philippine Islands, despite the 
Chinese Exclusion Act, applied to the Philip- 
pines in 1902, there are some 50,000 Chinese in 
the islands, and 25,000 Americans and Euro- 
peans. 

Given the opportunity afforded by equal laws, 
fair taxation, absence of "squeeze," the short 
name for official embezzlement, and they become 
in other countries not merely hard-working and 
economically living coolies, but merchants, ship- 
owners, owners and workers of mines, bankers, 
and rank in their commercial integrity with the 
best. All over the Far East, and wherever in 



380 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

the West we have dealings with the Chinese, 
there is nothing but praise of their punctilious 
honesty and honor as traders. They are a peo- 
ple of great physical adaptability. All climates 
seem to suit them and they are equally at home in 
Siberia, in India, in South America, or in Can- 
ada; and even in the days before American con- 
trol, when Panama was a death-trap, they went 
there. 

The Malay is a gentleman, a gentleman of the 
kind described by an English groom: "'Ad hall 
the hinstincts of a gentleman, 'unts, wears a top- 
'at, and lives hout 'Eadingly way!" The Ma- 
lay loves idleness and fine clothes, and upsets 
the dictum of Voltaire completely: "Le repos est 
une bonne chose, mais Tennui est son frere," for 
he is apparently never tired or bored by idleness. 
I suppose somewhere and sometimes he works, 
but in the few days I was in and about Singa- 
pore, I never detected him in any form of useful 
activity. Perhaps the women support the men; 
at all events the Malays have asserted the primi- 
tive rights of man, and it is the men who strut 
in the fine feathers. To see a Malay in a hy- 
brid costume of East and West with a bowler 
hat on the side of his head, and a cigar in the 
corner of his mouth, taking the air of an even- 
ing drawn by a sweating Chinese, is to see an 



JOHN CHINAMAN 381 

economic puzzle indeed. How he procures the 
wherewithal, and how he asserts his right to ride, 
is a mystery hidden away beneath the bowler 
hat. Even my English friend, with a rubber 
plantation in the interior, could give no satis- 
factory explanation. 

It is the Chinese who do all the work. A 
Chinese in the shafts of a jinrickisha w trundled 
me to the hotel at Singapore, a Chinese showed 
me to my room, a Chinese waited on me in the 
dining-room, and a Chinese made me at home 
when I wandered into the Singapore Club. 

I have tested my own training and traditions, 
my principles and my prejudices carefully, and I 
believe honestly, but I can give no reason better 
than mere instinct for my racial likes and dis- 
likes. To me the Chinese are by far the most 
agreeable people in the East, but I should find 
it hard to give any comprehensive analysis of 
Indians, Malays, Burmese, Japanese, Koreans, 
and Chinese to account for this preference. I 
know them to be cruel, lecherous, wily, rapacious, 
and of abounding patience in what we consider 
wrong-doing, and notwithstanding all that, I 
seem to detect something virile and independent 
about them; some quality of playing the game 
the way we play it, that is lacking in the others. 

Almost every afternoon when it got cool enough 



382 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

for a walk, I wended my way down the long 
street by the water-front, till I came to the 
swarming Chinese quarter, and there I watched 
them buying, selling, gambling, eating, and 
sleeping. The coolies eat in the street. There 
is a long row of out-of-door restaurants consist- 
ing of a long table, with benches on three sides, 
and piles of food and bowls and chop-sticks. 
The proprietor fills the bowl of his customer 
with steaming rice, adds bits of dried fish, and 
vegetables, and perhaps puppy-meat, — and why 
not, since Hippocrates himself held that the 
flesh of puppies was equal to that of birds, — 
and then begins a race between the appetite and 
the chop-sticks, aptly called ''nimble-sons," 
which would do credit to an accomplished pres- 
tidigitator. 

One fat old Chinese boniface, behind one of 
these restaurant tables, in his blue night-gown 
costume, and jaunty wide-awake hat, two sizes 
too small for him, on his head, used to grin ap- 
preciatively at me, and no doubt cracked all 
sorts of jokes at my expense with his gobbling 
guests, to judge from his winks to them and at 
me, and the smiles and chatter that followed. 
If I had been sure of my digestion, I should have 
joined the party, just for the jollity and good- 
fellowship. 



JOHN CHINAMAN 383 

Better-Informed travellers than I, have re- 
marked upon this Chinese characteristic of 
cheerfulness, their tolerance of disagreeable 
things, their invincible contentment, their good- 
humor under every kind of discomfort, and 
under the severest bodily toil ; as one writer puts 
it : "They seem to have acquired a national habit 
of looking upon the bright side." After the 
listlessness, the lack of physical endurance, the 
furtive impudence of the southern Indians, 
the Chinese struck me as being positively jolly. 
That this is a racial trait is evidenced by the 
difference between the Ghurkhas in India, who 
are really Mongolians, and all other Indians. 
They too love a joke, a good story, and are 
invincibly cheerful, and many Englishmen say, 
the best soldiers in India. If this be true, one 
wonders why some day the Chinese may not 
recover from their present classification of 
human value, which puts the scholar first, the 
farmer next, the artisan next, and the mer- 
chant and the soldier last; and give the man of 
action his proper place in the social hierarchy. 

It is all very well to dream as long as dreams 
are not your master; all very well to think so 
long as thoughts are not your aim, as Kipling 
well says; for neither dreams nor thoughts are 
more than glistening colored bubbles unless they 



384 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

be translated into belief and action. When one 
sees Chinese school-boys of all ages drilling and 
marching and carrying real guns ; when one sees 
a well-equipped mountain-battery out for exer- 
cise and practice, as I did, one gets a notion 
that the Chinese are indeed making ready for 
action. The great wall of China was begun 
before the Christian era and was building for 
seventeen hundred years, but the Chinese move 
more quickly now. 

Unfortunately for my plans, the Chinese on 
the Yangtse River were indulging in a mo- 
mentary dislike of missions and missionaries, 
and translating their prejudices into murders and 
bonfires, just at the time that I arrived in Hong- 
kong. The Yangtse River is navigable by bat- 
tle-ships for two hundred and thirty miles, or 
as far up as Nanking, and as far as Han-Kow 
by vessels of considerable size, and is the Missis- 
sippi River trade route of China. It takes its 
rise in the far-off mountains of Thibet, and is 
some three thousand miles in length, and navi- 
gable for about two thousand miles. Instead of 
going from Hongkong to Shanghai, and then up 
this great Yangtse River to Han-Kow, and then 
across country to Peking, I was obliged to leave 
this interesting journey for more peaceful times. 
I suppose a civilization cutting its teeth, on the 



JOHN CHINAMAN 385 

way from one stage of growth to another, must 
necessarily behave in a fretful and sometimes 
violent manner ; and just at the time I was 
wondering and dreaming over the possibility of 
a Chinese nation armed and in action, a fraction 
of the population turned to breaking heads and 
burning meeting-houses, forcing the authorities 
to refuse permission to travellers to journey in 
that direction. 

To those of us who know something of the be- 
havior of the European troops during the Boxer 
troubles, of the cruelties of Cossacks and Jap- 
anese and others ; of the killing of men, women 
and children; of the rifling of graves, and the 
breaking open of coflBus to get at the money that 
the Chinese bury with their dead, and the use 
of these coffins as dining-tables ; to those of us 
who know these things, there is little excuse to 
be made, and small reason for surprise when the 
Chinese indulge in similar atrocities. Perhaps 
there is something of the Tartar in all of us when 
we are scratched deep enough. What the Chi- 
nese saw of us on our way to relieve Peking was 
not calculated to impress them with our gen- 
tleness, our honesty, or our qualifications to pose 
as examples of a higher form of civilization. 

For my personal acquaintance with the Chi- 
nese, I was obliged, therefore, to content myself 



386 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

with what I saw of them along the coast, and at 
Hongkong, Canton, and in Manchuria. 

I know of nothing more destructive of the 
sense of proportion than a map unaccompanied 
by a time-table. It was three weeks or more 
before I reached Hongkong from Calcutta, a 
journey which looks much shorter on the map. 
But steamers do not always connect to suit one's 
personal itinerary, and where they do there may 
be no accommodai,ion for the pilgrim, who travels 
not according to Cook but as his fancy dictates. 

Hongkong in the language of diplomacy was 
ceded: in plain English, was taken, in 1842, by 
the British from the Chinese. Whether the 
quarrel was a matter of opium trading, or of 
unwarranted aggression on the part of the Chi- 
nese, does not concern us here, and had best 
be left to the limbo of academic discussion. At 
all events British governing here has accom- 
plished what both the Chinese and the British 
may well be proud to show to the rest of the 
world. Sixty years ago it was a convenient nest 
for the daring Cantonese pirates; and then, as 
still to-day, the Cantonese w^ere reckoned the 
most turbulent, restless, and daring population 
in all China. 

What Sir William des Voeux, a former gov- 
ernor, writes of Hongkong is all true, and the 



JOHN CHINAMAN 387 

description might be even more brightly colored 
without exaggeration. **Long lines of quays 
and wharves, large warehouses teeming with 
merchandise, shops stocked with all the luxuries, 
as well as the needs of two civilizations; in the 
European quarter a fine town-hall, stately banks, 
and other buildings of stone; in the Chinese 
quarter houses, constructed after a pattern pecu- 
liar to China, of almost equally solid materials, 
but packed so closely together and thronged so 
densely as to be in this respect probably without 
parallel in the world (one hundred thousand peo- 
ple live within a certain district not exceeding 
half a square mile in area), and finally streets 
stretching for miles, abounding with carriages 
(drawn for the most part not by animals but by 
men), and teeming with a busy population, in 
the centre of the town chiefly European, but 
toward the west and east almost exclusively 
Chmese. . . . And when it is further remembered 
that the Chinese, whose labor and enterprise 
under British auspices have largely assisted in 
this development, have been under no com- 
pulsion, but have come here as free men, at- 
tracted by liberal institutions, equitable treat- 
ment, and the justice of our rule; when all this 
is taken into account, it may be doubted whether 
the evidences of material and moral achieve- 



388 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

ment, presented as it were in a focus, make any- 
where a more forcible appeal to eye and imagi- 
nation." What the English have accomplished 
here and elsewhere; what we Americans have 
done in improving the Philippine Islands, and 
the almost fairy-like change that has been 
wrought by the American army engineers and 
surgeons in the canal district at Panama, stand 
out as imperishable monuments, not merely of 
our honorable intentions, but of our unequalled 
efficiency as altruistic governors of alien peoples 
and of strange lands. Nor Rome, nor any 
modern power, can point to such colossal suc- 
cesses in brotherly helpfulness, untainted by 
even the suspicion of corruption. 

It was my privilege to travel across Siberia 
with the present Governor of Hongkong, Sir 
Frederick Lugard. He told me something of 
his plans for a university at Hongkong. Sir 
Frederick is the kind of advocate of peace in 
whom one believes. Bearing many wounds as 
the result of his soldiering, and of his successful 
campaigns for peace and orderliness in Uganda, 
he is now fostering the splendid peace plan of 
an international university at Hongkong. 

Why does not some American of wealth, who 
believes in peace rather than in self-advertising, 
give a handsome sum of money for the founda- 



JOHN CHINAMAN 389 

tion of one or more chairs to be filled by Ameri- 
can professors in this university, which is al- 
ready under way, the foundation-stone having 
been laid last year? An American chair of 
History of Commerce, or of Ethnic Religions, to 
be filled, say two years at a time, by a lecturer 
chosen from among the many American scholars 
who are interested in furthering a better under- 
standing between the East and the West; this 
would be a worthy gift indeed from the American 
nation, which has already assured the Chinese 
of our belief in fair-play by the generous return 
to China of an overpayment for losses during 
the Boxer uprising. The Chinese have been no 
less gracious to us. China sent her first general 
Embassy to foreign countries in 1868. Her "En- 
voy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary " 
was the Hon. Anson Burlingame, accompanied 
by two Chinese, who appear as "Associated High 
Envoys and Ministers." The wording of the 
United States Treaty of 1868, and the diplomatic 
correspondence at the time, show, therefore, that 
China confided to an American the task of 
framing new treaties, and of representing her in 
the delicate negotiations dealing with her rela- 
tions with foreign nations. 

As early as 1785 we sent a trading-ship to 
China, and the first half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury saw, what the Chinese still call our country. 



390 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

the "flowery flag," on the fastest sailing-sliips 
afloat, in Chinese ports. By the Treaty of 
Washington in 1868 we disclaimed all intention 
of interfering in Chinese afl'airs, and down to 
this present time we have taken the attitude of 
fair-play as between other nations and China, 
and what is more to the point, of fair-play for 
China as well. Such a gift would not only be 
a direct and permanent means of promoting that 
sympathetic understanding which makes for 
peace, but it would be at the same time another 
link between the one hundred and forty millions 
of us who speak the English language. The 
gift of half a million dollars for such a purpose 
would mean that the voice of America's picked 
scholarship would be heard for generations by 
the chosen students of China. That would be 
indeed worth while. 

I was intending to write of four aspects of 
Hongkong which won my interest. First, of 
course, of her neighbor Canton ; then of the un- 
equalled collection of Chinese porcelain of Sir 
Paul Chater; next of the charm of the "Peak," 
and then of Sir Frederick Lugard, and his plans 
for an international university now under way. 
It is significant that the university plan ran 
away with my pen first, as soon as I found 
myself writing of Hongkong; and I should 
consider it a year's hard travel, and hard work 



JOHN CHINAMAN 391 

well paid for, if one of my many countrymen, 
with the means at his command, should be 
tempted to pledge America's co-operation in this 
wise method of linking East and West together 
in the only bonds that are lasting, those of in- 
tellectual sympathy and mutual understanding. 

The ''Peak," so called, in Hongkong is the 
hill overlooking the harbor, which has been 
sown and planted till it is the garden as well as 
the residential part of the town. A funicular 
railway lifts you to the top, and once there, par- 
ticularly of a starlight night, with the hundreds 
of lights twinkling on the vessels in the harbor 
below; for it is one of the great harbors of the 
world, and one constantly filled with craft of all 
kinds; the picture takes its place, and remains 
in the memory, alongside the wonderful harbor 
at Rio de Janeiro ; the harbor at San Francisco ; 
and the fabulous and mythical aspect of New 
York harbor, with its extortionate demands upon 
credulity, when one sees the high buildings 
looming behind the Statue of Liberty, at dusk 
or at dawn. 

Whatever may be the gastronomic limitations 
of the stewards of the steamship lines in this 
quarter of the world. Sir Paul Chater is not 
hampered by them. I will not say that his 
luncheon was equal to the treasures of porce- 



392 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

lain which he showed me, but it was in keeping 
with them. For years he has been buying and 
sifting, and with all China knowing that he 
stood ready as a purchaser of anything rare and 
beautiful. As a result his collection of Chinese 
porcelains is to other collections, whether public 
or private, as are the prints of a college fresh- 
man to the engravings in the British Museum. 
And what a revelation of the Chinese it is, to see 
here these wonders of their deftness, their purity 
of style, their feeling for color, in their days of 
artistic supremacy, in the middle of the seven- 
teenth century. 

A people of such industry, of such cheerfulness, 
of such endurance, of such commercial and ar- 
tistic prowess: how is it, one asks oneself, that 
they remain so behind in the competitive race of 
the nations? The honesty and uprightness of 
Chinese merchants and bankers is as prover- 
bial throughout the world as is the shiftiness 
and untrustworthiness of the Japanese of the 
same class; while on the other hand, the official 
corruption in China spreads throughout the land 
like a gangrene, eating away at all national en- 
terprises, and maiming the industrial hands and 
feet, in every effort to move. 

This strange difference between the commer- 
cial code and the official code in China is 



JOHN CHINAMAN 393 

confusing. The merchant's word is as good 
as his bond, while the official all over China 
lives openly upon "squeeze." No government 
official is intended to, or can possibly live upon, 
his pay. The old-time, and by far the easiest, 
method for an autocratic rule is to farm out the 
taxes, to demand a certain sum of the officials 
appointed, and to leave it to them to get what 
they can for themselves. This was once the 
way in India and in Japan, and later in Rome 
and in France. Indeed, the historical memory 
need not be long to recall the days when the 
British House of Commons was bought and 
sold like a flock of sheep; and the ominous 
growl: "To the victors belong the spoils" is still 
heard, though sotto voce, in America to-day. 

I suppose there is no business man in our 
country who would not jump at the chance to 
take over our post-office department, with its ex- 
clusive privileges, prepared to make a fortune. 

It is no doubt honestly conducted, so far as 
pilfering is concerned, but the offices and officials 
therein are all political spoils. The tenure is 
uncertain, there is no reward for efficiency, and 
no temptation to work harder than bare neces- 
sity requires. There is no barefaced *' squeeze," 
but the government is cheated all over the coun- 
try by perfunctory labor, by skimped hours of 



394 THE \VEST IN THE EAST 

work, and by the lack of enthusiasm of those 
who feel themselves to be working for a soulless 
monster with no means and no intention of re- 
warding personal eflSciency and devotion. In a 
fashion, we farm out to the victorious political 
party this opportunity to repay its adherents 
and its workers, and waste enormous sums on 
what is practically mortpay. No one doubts 
for a moment that if our post-office department 
were managed as is the Pennsylvania Rail- 
road, for example, with every employee chosen 
and kept and rewarded for efficiency and ability, 
there would be dividends instead of deficits. 

We need not, therefore, throw up our hands 
in horror at the Chinese. In an attenuated, but 
still perceptible form, the philosophy of Chinese 
"squeeze" exists to-day in the bureaucracy of 
every government in Europe and in the Ameri- 
cas. What Chinese gentlemen would think of 
the petty and contemptible pilfering of ''Favors,'* 
which is a feature of every fashionable cotillon 
in our country, the more flagrant the more val- 
uable the "Favors," is best left unanswered. 

China is the more easily the victim of this 
political malady in a virulent form because its 
capital at Peking is not centrally situated, rail- 
ways are few, good roads unknown, the post- 
office a negligible quantity; and consequently 



JOHN CHINAMAN 395 

outside the territory just around Peking the 
oflScials of the vast Empire are under little or no 
supervision or restraint. 

One has only to see something of these vast 
stretches of territory without railroads, without 
telegraph offices, and with few post-offices to 
learn how much we owe to our own railroads 
for their efficiency as moral agents. Leaving 
out of the count any question of commerce, the 
United States to-day would be a great federal 
political and moral chaos without its railroads; 
and yet I have never heard them alluded to 
even as having any ethical value. It is right to 
debate these questions whether in a republic or 
in China. The value of the debate, however, 
depends altogether upon the tone and temper 
of the discussion. I believe in insurgency. In- 
surgency is the only political or social purgative 
of any value in a democracy; but the insurgent 
must be neither a fanatic nor a fakir; he is, alas, 
all too often one or the other; and America 
has suffered of late from a veritable plague of 
left-handed Catos. Therefore, I counsel my 
readers to adopt my method. As an observer, 
as a traveller, as a student, I know of no instru- 
ment of criticism so helpful as sympathy. You 
must like a man to get out of him the best he 
has to give. Mere denunciation is a weapon of 



396 THE \VEST IN THE EAST 

the ethical age, of the eocene lemur, and the 
calcareous sponge. 

If the Chinese cure themselves of this disease 
of oflBcial peculation it is hard to set a limit to 
their national or commercial progress. The 
Abbe Hue writes: ''The Chinese is born with 
this taste for traffic, which grows with his growth 
and strengthens with his strength. The first 
thing a child looks for is a sapeck ; the first use 
that he makes of his speech and intelligence is 
to learn to articulate the names of coins; when 
his little fingers are strong enough to hold the 
pencil, it is with making figures that he amuses 
himself, and as soon as the tiny creature can 
speak and walk he is capable of buying and 
selling. The Chinese has a passionate love of 
lucre ; he is fond of all kinds of speculations and 
stock- jobbing, and his mind, full of finesse and 
cunning, takes delight in combining and calcu- 
lating the chances of a commercial operation." 

The shrewdest comment ever made upon the 
methods of our Stock Exchange was made by a 
Chinese. Prince Li Hung Chang was escorted 
to Wall Street, and in a certain broker's office 
he was shown a "ticker" machine rolling off the 
prices of stocks. It was expected by his host 
that he would be astonished, if not bewildered, 
at these financial heart-beats made visible on a 



JOHN CHINAMAN 397 

strip of paper. When asked what he thought of 
it, he replied: "I think I should prefer to play 
in a game where I can see the cards shuffled." 

A few hours by steamer from Hongkong, upon 
the Canton River, brings one to China as we pict- 
ure China to ourselves; for Canton contains all 
the materials, from pig-tails to puppies, which 
supply the Western imagination with its notions 
of the Chinese. Canton is surrounded by a wall 
six or seven miles in circumference, and is filled, 
literally filled, if the eye is to be trusted, with a 
population of something under a million. You 
settle yourself in a sedan-chair borne by four 
coolies, and you are carried swiftly through the 
narrrow streets, nowhere more than seven feet 
wide, and the noise and the smells and the 
traffic and the sights and scenes are so numb- 
ing, that one sympathizes with the man who 
found himself with so much to do that he went 
a-fishing. It is as impossible at first to make 
out what this swarm of people are doing as to 
disentangle the activities of an ant-hill. 

The river itself is thronged with boats upon 
which thousands of families live from one 
year's end to the other. Some of them even have 
small plots of earth on them, in which seeds are 
planted, and very few of them lack chickens and 
dogs and babies; and a net let down into one 



398 THE ^M5ST IN THE EAST 

of those family gondolas would bring up the 
strangest and most ill-assorted catch that ever 
fisherman landed. 

The girl babies must have but a small chance 
in this land of infanticide, with a w^atery grave 
so convenient. Who has ever heard the mem- 
bers of a family even at home say : yes, we have 
a new baby, if that baby is a boy; or neglect to 
proclaim: yes, we have a new baby boy! In 
China they carry this prepossession in favor of 
the male, as they do still to some extent in India 
and Japan, to its cruel logical conclusion. In 
the Chinese characters or ideographs used for 
writing, a woman with a lid on her is the word 
for Quiet, while three women together is the 
ideograph for Noise. In this swarming life, the 
girl w^ho must have a dot w^hen she marries, and 
who is incompetent to carry on the worship of 
the ancestors, which alone in China is the uni- 
versal form of worship prescribed and accepted, 
is often looked upon as an inconvenient burden, 
and if so widely recognized an authority as the 
Rev. Arthur H. Smith is to believed, is often dis- 
posed of by murder. 

Both here and later I came into contact with 
a number of the better-class Chinese, as their 
guest or as a fellow-guest. They are much 
easier in their manners, more composed and self- 



JOHN CHINAMAN 399 

reliant, more dignified, than either the Indians 
or the Japanese. Even a European of standing 
and social experience might find it a trying or- 
deal to be the only one of his race present, say 
at a dinner where all the other guests were Chi- 
nese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians. On one 
occasion, at a meal where fourteen of us were 
present, there was one Chinese, but no one there 
was more at his ease, more agreeable, or better 
mannered than he; and I should add that he 
spoke no English, and had never travelled far 
out of his own country. He is the one Oriental, 
except a few of the great Indian nobles, who 
seems quite unembarrassed, quite sure of his 
social and racial position, and who gives no evi- 
dence, either by awkward bumptiousness or by 
sycophancy, that he is ill at ease. 

The traveller w^ho only sees the Chinese in this 
swarming human ant-hill at Canton, or in similar 
crowded colonies elsewhere, gets little notion of 
the superior qualities of the race. While those 
who only see the Chinese coolies in the various 
Chinatowns of the Western world; who read of 
plague and famine and of attacks upon mission- 
aries; who have heard of the terrible Taiping 
rebellion led by Hung Hsien-Chuen, a Christian 
convert, and which was first a religious and then 
a political crusade in which twenty million lives 



400 THE WEST IN TIIE EAST 

were lost; who remember the Boxer trouble, 
and its terrors, have as false an idea of China 
and the Chinese as the English village laborer 
has of America, who believes it to be a land of 
conflagrations, railroad accidents, divorces, lynch- 
ings and blatant millionaires whose chief exercise 
consists in throwing their daughters at British 
peers in the hope of bagging their coronets. 

For example, it is a universally held belief in 
the West that the smells in China are almost 
weighable. This is true, because, as here in 
Canton, there is no effort at sanitation except in 
the European quarter. But the Chinese them- 
selves do not smell; on the contrary they smell 
us, and find the odor most disagreeable. We 
eat strong food, and many of us drink strong 
drinks; the Chinese do not. On the hottest 
day, in a room filled with Chinese, there is no 
disagreeable odor from their persons. No one 
with a wholesome and unprejudiced sense of 
smell can say as much for us. 

It is, I must confess, unpleasant to see in their 
markets dogs trussed up and ready to sell, and 
cat meat, rat meat, hawks and other unpalata- 
ble birds, reptiles and animals and eggs dating 
back to a former dynasty, and cakes of fried 
grasshoppers offered as food. A Chinese, on the 
other hand, might well be shocked at the external 



JOHN CHINAMAN 401 

decorations of our butcher-shops at Christmas 
time, when we express our good-will to men by 
devouring a greater variety of animal food, both 
wild and tame, than at other times; he might 
also suggest, in these days when speculation has 
entered the funereal field of cold storage, that 
whether eggs or butter or fish or chickens date 
from the reign of Taft or Roosevelt or Cleveland, 
or from Tai-tsung of the Tang dynasty, who 
edited the Chinese classics in two hundred thou- 
sand volumes a thousand years ago, is merely a 
matter of taste, he himself preferring the Tai- 
tsung vintage to a later one. 

We have a way of putting our Western moral 
and mental machinery inside the Oriental body, 
and then of mapping out the probable processes 
of development accordingly. There is no surer 
way of arriving at false conclusions. Not long 
ago I read an article in one of our magazines in 
which the writer said: "Within eighteen months 
China will have a parliament or a revolution." 
This is the typical journalese bosh of those who 
are satisfied to make a sensation by turning the 
epitaphs of truth into head-lines. The Chinese 
never do anything in so short a time as eighteen 
months, and they are, moreover, profoundly sus- 
picious of those who do. We ourselves just now, 
both at Washington and in many of our State 



402 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

legislatures, are spending our time and ingenuity 
in disentangling ourselves from hastily framed 
laws. The logical outcome of our law-making 
pace will be a code of laws for, and applicable 
to, each individual inhabitant, and then Quis 
custodiet custodes? 

The inveterate distinction between the East 
and the West is as deeply cut in the racial life 
of to-day as ever it was. Even in Japan, it is 
apparent beneath the thin lacquer of Occident- 
alism; while in China, the educated Chinese 
will tell you that his government is far more 
stable than that of any European or xAimerican 
state; that orderliness is not more frequently dis- 
turbed than in the revolutionary, lynching, war- 
ring and strike-producing West; that he has an 
ethical code equal to that of the West, and a re- 
ligion the mandates of which are observed as 
loyally as our own. We write and speak of the 
East from a maze of unabashed ignorance; and 
they on their part do not trouble to correct or to 
contradict us. 

That the Chinese are formulating plans to pro- 
tect themselves from further commercial aggres- 
sion, and from the persistent grabbing of their ter- 
ritory by their Christian well-wishers, is true ; but 
it is done that they may remain more securely 
Chinese, not that they may adopt our Western 



JOHN CHINAMAN 403 

institutions and constitutions, as the glib and 
superficial among us are pleased to proclaim. 

Those who have no past of tradition, culture 
or experience, may be pardoned for assuming 
that there is nothing but the present, but only 
pardoned because they are ignorant, not because 
they are right. They think their own tombs 
and temples unsurpassed because they know 
nothing of the pyramids and tombs of Egypt; 
they think the statues and architecture of our 
Western cities unequalled because they have 
never heard of Pheidias and Praxiteles, and the 
Taj and the Alhambra; they rejoice in modern 
dramatists who know not the names of JEschy- 
lus and Aristophanes ; they presume to grade all 
literature, to whom Pindar and Lucretius are 
dim shades; they volunteer short histories, to 
whom Herodotus and Thucydides are unknown; 
and they rate China low who have never met a 
Chinese gentleman, never dealt with a Chinese 
merchant, never read a line of Chinese literature 
or history, and who do not know the name of 
Confucius. This is a ragged and unkempt way 
of dealing with other peoples, who may have 
some reason to scorn what we cherish. When 
one recalls such names and monuments, it be- 
comes clear that there is room for the argument 
that in certain directions our evolution may look 



404 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

like deterioration to those who examine us im- 
partially from a distance. Gal ton writes that the 
average Athenian was as much superior to the 
average European of to-day as we are superior 
to the African negro. 

We are closely connected with the East, and 
we are asking commercial favors of the East; 
we are demanding that we may share in loans to 
them nowadays, and it is therefore an awkward 
time to write and to talk of them with that flip- 
pant condescension born of ignorance and inex- 
perience. The attitude of our great democra- 
cies that everything which is different is therefore 
inferior, and fair game for ridicule, is the atti- 
tude of the small boy in a village street, who 
laughs and jeers at a new figure or a strange 
costume. It is sheer intellectual hooliganism. 
It is the business of those better informed, and 
therefore more sympathetic, to persuade our 
great unwieldy mass of ignorant voters that the 
wave of mastery and influence from West to 
East is now on the w^ane. The East is rapidly 
becoming strong enough to be independent, and 
to make terms, instead of having terms dictated, 
as from a superior to an inferior. 

Mr. Taft, who by his training and experience 
at least, and, as I personally believe, by his up- 
rightness of character, is as well fitted for the 



JOHN CHINAMAN 405 

office he holds as any executive we have ever 
had, shows how valuable his imperial experi- 
ence has been when he points to Peking as the 
most difficult post in our diplomatic service; be- 
cause it is the foreign post of greatest opportu- 
nity, and requiring the most suave, dignified 
and competent methods. We want no "new 
diplomacy" there, with its bustle and hustle 
and its furtive bribery. 

The Lord deliver us from the hack politician 
in the East, in these difficult days. The man of 
that type, who may and does fool the people at 
home, will not deceive the Chinese for an instant. 
As in India, the British Government must pick 
and choose with care its military and civilian 
officials, because whatever else they lack the 
Indians are unerring in detecting the difference 
between the Sahib and the non-Sahib, and giv- 
ing him their confidence accordingly; so in China 
there are not only Chinese gentlemen ranking 
in probity and courtesy with any in the world, 
but there are four million pairs of eyes with an 
almost uncanny ability to discriminate between 
the shoddy and the genuine in gentlemanliness ; 
and we shall measure our influence accurately 
and inevitably by the type of men we send there 
as our representatives. Our commerce with 
China, which has decreased since 1905 from some 



406 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

fifty-eight million to about fifteen million dollars, 
and our narrowly avoided humiliation in a late 
loan transaction, ought to stir us to a realization 
of our slovenly assumption that in dealing with 
the Chinese we are dealing with barbarians and 
inferiors. 

Those jammed, seven-foot-wide streets in 
Canton, with the coolies swinging by with long 
poles weighted with merchandise at each end 
of them; those tiny shops filled with furs, em- 
broideries, linen, ivory, carved furniture, and 
their keepers fingering the abacus, or counting 
over their goods; one shop filled with valuable 
ivories and jade and feathers, cunning carvings 
and gold ornaments, and beside it another, whose 
occupant carries on some primitive handicraft 
with the awkward implements of a thousand 
years ago ; the dozen shop assistants who tumble 
down a narrow stairway into the tiny sales-room 
when we enter to look at Mandarin coats, and 
who all enter into the bargaining with a zeal that 
shows that this is no dull routine, but a combi- 
nation of a game and an entertainment, with a 
money prize in proportion to the success of the 
suave duplicity displayed; in another shop the 
astonishing swiftness and deftness and orderli- 
ness with which they pull out, and put back, 
and fold up the hundreds of pieces of grass- 



JOHN CHINAMAN 407 

cloth and linen and embroideries shown us; the 
temples populated with unknown gods; mort- 
uary chapels where polished teak-wood or ma- 
hogany coflSns, with a stand beside them on 
which are placed a light and tea and rice, and 
whose occupants wait till the soothsayer has de- 
termined upon the fortunate place for burial, 
a suspense which lingers according to the wealth 
of the family of the deceased; the edible dog 
market; the sleepy admiral in his magnificent 
silk-lined and gilt-ornamented chair, borne by 
six coolies, and escorted by Chinese marines 
with old-fashioned muskets over their shoulders ; 
the unending, penetrating noise which your 
ears seem to breathe like an atmosphere; the 
undisturbed and mask-like yellow^ faces and nar- 
row unlighted eyes; the utter indifference to the 
lack of privacy, a characteristic of all Orientals, 
and one which I often think explains their back- 
wardness, for it is impossible to store up ex- 
perience, which is the only motive power of real 
progress, except by quiet thought; the persist- 
ent touters who follow us with beseechings to 
visit their shops; the sweating coolies who bear 
our chairs, and who feign awful exhaustion after 
a particularly long trip, and who laugh and 
poke fun at one another when I insist upon 
feeling their heart- and pulse-beats, and thus dis- 



408 THE AVEST IN THE EAST 

cover to what extent they are play-acting. All 
this is China, but do not be deceived; that wise 
old Li Hung Chang was China too; and hun- 
dreds more like him who have studied in Eng- 
land, Germany, America and Japan are China 
too; and unlike too many of us, they have 
learned the quintessence of wisdom, that the 
cleverest conceal their cleverness. 

I do not hesitate to say that if there is to be 
aniity and fair dealing between us, that the first 
step must be taken by us, and that in the di- 
rection of correcting false impressions, and of 
convincing our own people of their abysmal 
ignorance of the real China. The complacent 
assumption that China has only to copy us to be 
saved, which is practically universal in America, 
is a gutter-stage of intellectual enlightenment, 
and as dangerous as it is ludicrous. In very 
many respects ours is no more a civilization to be 
copied than is theirs; and we should never for 
a moment forget that the Chinese, high and low, 
educated and uneducated, those who have seen 
us and those who have not, look upon us as bar- 
barians; and hold that many of our social and 
political doings are foul blots upon the ethno- 
logical map, upon which the races of the world 
have traced their progress. 



X 

JAPAN 

THE first edition of the "Encyclopaedia 
Britannica" had this much, and no more, 
to say of Japan: "Japan or Islands 
of Japan, are situated between 130 deg. and 144 
deg. of E. long., and between 30 deg. and 40 deg. 
N, lat." Some twenty-five words sufficed to tell 
the world all that anybody cared to know about 
Japan. During the last quarter of a century, 
Japan has more written words of description to 
her credit than any other country in the world. 
It is characteristic of the childlike innocence, or 
of the duplicity, of the Japanese, that even their 
historical ancestry is a gross forgery. During 
the last Paris exhibition, and at the last Japan- 
British exhibition, one saw and heard a great 
deal of Japan's two thousand five hundred years 
of history, and of the authentic ancestry of the 
Mikado, reaching back not for hundreds but 
for thousands of years. This is taught in the 
schools of Japan to-day, and told to, and written 
for, foreigners by the Japanese themselves, 

409 



410 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

A Mr. Hitomi, a Japanese, writes for the 
French public: "La Longue duree de I'Empire 
du Soleil Levant est une des choses les plus mer- 
veilleuses de ce monde. Quand il vit la lumiere 
tous les pays Europeens d'aujourd'hui dormaient 
encore dans les entrailles du chaos. C'est 333 
ans avant la conquete des Indes par Alexandre 
le Grand et 612 ans avant la victoire de Cesar 
sur Pompee que Jimmu, premier empereur du 
Japon, pla9a le berceau de TEmpire parmi les 
fleurs odoriferantes des plaines du Yamato." 
As a bouquet of artificial rhetorical flowers this 
has seldom been equalled. As a matter of fact 
the first date in Japanese history which is trust- 
worthy is A. D. 461. Fable and fact do not be- 
gin to separate until that date. 

As late as 1892 one professor of history at the 
University of Tokio was dismissed for writing 
critically of the early mikados ; as a result we find 
in a successor's, Mr. Haja's, "Lectures on Ja- 
pan" the following: "Some of the odes preserved 
in the Kojiki and Nihongi were composed by the 
gods, some by Jimmu Tennu and other ancient 
Mikados, and one by a monkey ! " Mr. Chamber- 
lain, in "Things Japanese," writes: "The so- 
called historical part is as devoid as the other of 
all contemporary evidence. It is contradicted by 
the more trustworthy, because contemporary. 



JAPAN 411 

Chinese and Korean records, and — to turn from 
negative to positive testimony — can be proved 
in some particulars to rest on actual forgery. 
For instance, the fictitious nature of the calen- 
dars employed to calculate the early dates for 
about thirteen centuries (from B. C. 660 onward) 
has not altogether escaped the notice even of the 
Japanese themselves, and has been clearly ex- 
posed for European readers by that careful in- 
vestigator, the late Mr. William Bramsen, who 
says, when discussing them in the Introduction 
to his 'Japanese Chronological Tables': *It is 
hardly too severe to style this one of the greatest 
literary frauds ever perpetrated.' " 

The story of the ancient civilization of Japan 
is as much a fable as the story of the Golden 
Fleece, or Ariadne. That this mythology is 
taught in Japanese schools, and written down 
for the European as history, is due to the ex- 
treme sensitiveness and colossal conceit of the 
Japanese, and also because the worship cf the 
Imperial Ancestry is made a national religion 
amongst the mass of the people. Once the 
small knot of feudal nobles, who still govern 
Japan, lose the influence of the worshipped 
Mikado, whom they always call upon in the last 
resort to drive home their legislative enactments 
among the people, the political troubles of Japan 



412 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

will begin in earnest. They know him to be a 
puppet king, but they realize that so long as the 
present feeling of the people toward him lasts, 
his sanction is practically the sanction of omnipo- 
tence. No wonder it is criminal to criticise, or 
even to discuss, the subject of his ancestry. 
Once the superstitious awe in which the Japan- 
ese Emperor is held by the people disappears, 
Japan will be like a study-table covered with 
papers, in a breeze, when the paper-weights 
have been taken away. 

The most interesting date in the history of 
Japan to the American is 1853, when Commo- 
dore Perry appeared and demanded, and in 1 854 
succeeded in obtaining, certain treaty rights 
granted also shortly after to England, France, 
and Russia. Japan at that time was governed 
by a feudal noble of the house of Tokugawa. 
The founder of this dynasty was a soldier, Hide- 
yoshi by name, who conquered Korea, and 
dreamed even of conquering China in the last 
years of the sixteenth century. His favorite 
lieutenant Tokugawa lewasu turned against 
Hideyoshi's son, defeated him in battle, consoli- 
dated his own power, and for two hundred and 
fifty years, or till Commodore Perry appeared, 
this family ruled Japan, the Emperor living in 
retirement but treated with respect by the 



JAPAN 413 

powerful Shoguns, the Daimyos or barons, and 
their men-at-arms the Samurai. 

The nation which can survive two hundred 
and fifty years of peace is either negligent or neg- 
ligible. Japan was both negligent and negli- 
gible. The great nobles and their followers 
had softened and shrunk both in power and 
ability. The jealousies, dissatisfactions and ri- 
valries came to life when the barbarians' ships 
appeared in the harbor of Yeddo. The Shogun 
was shufl3ing and hesitating, torn between fear 
of the barbarian intruder, and of his enemies 
at home if he treated with him. Rivals of the 
house of Tokugawa combined against them. 
Instead of the clan patriotism they saw that they 
must have national patriotism. Clan jealousies 
and enmities must be subordinated to national 
defence against the invader. It was seen that 
to keep out the European was impossible, and 
those in power persuaded their countrymen that 
it was better to learn of the foreigner than to fight 
him. By 1871 the clans and the feudal lords had 
given up their rights and privileges. Europeans 
were invited to Japan to teach, and the Japanese 
were studying European methods in England, in 
America, in Germany, and in France. Many of 
these Japanese, including the greatest among 
them, the late Prince Ito, were poor and with- 



414 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

out friends, and earned their living, while they 
studied and investigated, among strangers. The 
story of these patriotic Japanese, who emigrated 
voluntarily to hardship and unfriendliness for 
their country's sake, is one that any country 
might be proud to tell. 

What the Japanese have built, upon the foun- 
dations so patiently and painfully laid by these 
men, is reckoned the outstanding and pre-emi- 
nent national accomplishment of the last fifty 
years. Nobody can deprive them of their com- 
mercial, political and military successes, and so 
far as I know, nobody wishes to do so. If Japan 
has suffered at the hands of the Europeans, she 
has suffered from eulogy rather than from de- 
traction. Unstinted and uncritical praise has 
been her portion. She has been the young heir 
just come of age among the nations. We have 
all gone to the coming-of-age festivities, with 
best wishes and friendly words, ready to see only 
good in the youngster who has just come into his 
own, and with the liveliest and sincerest charity 
for youth, and the natural shortcomings of its 
exuberance and lack of experience. But the 
vagaries, impetuosities, and inconsequences of 
youth receive a different greeting, and other 
names and epithets, when they are continued on 
into early manhood. We rejoice at the baby's 



JAPAN 415 

first word, his first tooth, his first step; we won- 
der at the amazing amount of knowledge and 
experience he acquires in his first five years. If 
he could continue at that rate through life, he 
would easily out-Solomon Solomon in wisdom. 
We soon discover that the rate of progress di- 
minishes as the years increase, and we cease to 
find his acquisition of knowledge and experi- 
ence unusual. 

Who does not know men whose youth had its 
frailties, its oddities, its selfish inconsequences, 
which then were only gay and graceful; but in 
maturity, the frailties have fixed themselves in 
a rosy formlessness of nose; the oddities of man- 
ner have become unpleasant eccentricities; the 
inconsequence has become untrustworthiness. 
The very qualities that were not unpleasing in 
the youth, have become contemptible in the 
man. Youth has, and ought to have in the 
bank of all our hearts, a balance of a thousand 
pardons to draw upon; but of maturity we de- 
mand that the credit balance shall be the results 
of saving and economy and accomplishment. 

Japan has had her first tooth, and taken her 
first step, amid the wondering admiration of 
other peoples. She has built ships, organized 
commerce, founded a government, fought out a 
war. She is no longer an infant nor a callow 



416 THE AVEST IN THE EAST 

youth. New standards of judgment are being 
used in the measuring of her political, commer- 
cial, ethical and social stature; and both Japan 
and her later critics are frankly disappointed. 

The days for the Sir Edwin Arnold and Laf- 
cadio Hearn literary petting and dandling of the 
baby Japan have gone by. It was all mawkish 
enough at any time, and did Japan harm that 
lasts to this day; and my Japanese friends would, 
I am sure, consider it a grotesque study in insult 
were I to write to them, or about them, in the 
cooing and soft-syllabled noises of a nurse dan- 
dling a baby. I have no intention of doing so. 
I am merely an advanced picket for my country- 
men, returning to describe what I saw, and mak- 
ing no claim to infallibility or to a cut-and-dried 
solution of the problems awaiting us in the East. 
I bring merely maps, sketches, descriptions, 
opinions, surmises, and all without malice or 
prejudice, except that I am an x^merican, and if 
that be treason, I must submit to punishment 
from those I describe, in good part. 

For nearly a score of years I have been a 
visitor, from time to time, to a town in New Eng- 
land which is more closely linked to the history of 
Japan than any other town in the world. Why 
the Japanese Government has not put up a tab- 
let or a monument in the town of Fairhaven, 



JAPAN 417 

Massachusetts, I do not understand. It must 
be due to ignorance of the short story I am about 
to tell. 

Captain Whitfield, of Fairhaven, master of the 
ship John Howland, sighted, on a bare rock, 
in the Sea of Japan, a group of stranded, ship- 
wrecked Japanese sailors. This was in the year 
1841. He took them off and carried them to his 
first port, Honolulu. One of them, a lad of 
about fifteen, begged to be taken on with the 
ship. By the time the John Howland reached 
her home port of Fairhaven, the boy had picked 
up some smattering of the English language, and 
was liked by the whole ship's company. Cap- 
tain Whitfield paid for his schooling at a good 
private school in the town, and there is still 
living there, one at least, of his school-mates, 
who has described him to me. The boy's name 
was Nakahama Manjiro. At the end of six 
years Nakahama was one of the accomplished 
scholars in the school, and particularly interested 
in mathematics and navigation. Through Cap- 
tain Whitfield's good ofiices, he was enabled to 
pick up his former companions at Honolulu, and 
to return to Japan, where he arrived about the 
year 1849. He had almost forgotten his own 
tongue. He and his companions were suspected, 
and kept in close confinement, and their story 



418 TIIE WEST IN THE EAST 

doubted. As a test of the truth of his tale he 
was given the task of translating Bowditch's 
''Navigator," the theory of which he had tried 
to explain to his countrymen, into Japanese. 
This he succeeded in doing after a year or more 
of work. 

When Commodore Perry received a letter in 
English, in reply to his note to the ruler of Japan 
in 1853, he little knew that the writer of it had 
learned his English in a New England town not 
far from the home port of the Commodore himself. 
When he had his interview in person, he little 
suspected that concealed within hearing was a 
Japanese, whose assurances of the good-will and 
honorable intentions of the Americans, from a 
personal experience of their kindness and hospi- 
tality, was to carry greater weight with the rulers 
of Japan than the noise and size of his guns. 
If any one individual is to be credited with 
making the first intercourse between Japan and 
America easy and friendly, it is surely Naka- 
hama Manjiro, who was educated in Fairhaven, 
Massachusetts. He afterward became a per- 
sonage in Japan, was ennobled, navigated the 
first ship out of sight of land from that country, 
was sent by the Mikado to study the conditions 
during the war between France and Germany in 
1870, paid a short visit to America on his way 



JAPAN 419 

home, and leaves two sons, one a distinguished 
professor, and the other an officer in the Japan- 
ese navy. 

I believe Japan only needs to be reminded of 
this to ask the honor of commemorating in some 
suitable and permanent manner the hero of this 
story, in the town which gave him a home and 
an education. 

It is a far cry indeed from the Japan of the jBrst 
edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," or the 
Japan of 1853, to the Japan from which I have 
just returned. It is now a Japan with a popu- 
lation estimated at 50,000,000; with compul- 
sory education and compulsory military service; 
with an army of a peace strength of 250,000, and 
able to put and maintain 800,000 in the field; 
with 191 war vessels aggregating 493,371 tons, 
and an expenditure on the navy during the last 
four years placed at $133,807,000; with nearly 
5,000 miles of railways and 18,000 miles of tele- 
graph lines; with exports to Great Britain of 
25,522,000 yen,^ and imports from Great Britain 
of 107,796,000 yen; with exports to the United 
States of 121,997,000 yen, and imports from the 
United States of 77,637,000 yen; and with ex- 
ports to and imports from Germany of 7,976,- 
000 and 46,179,000 yen respectively. The popu- 

^ The yen is worth 50 cents in gold. 



420 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

lation is, six-tenths of it, engaged in agriculture, 
and one-tenth dependent upon the fisheries, or 
35,000,000 thus employed. So mountainous, 
barren, and difficult is the land, that even these 
people of ant-like industry and economy can 
only bring one-sixth of the total area of 147,651 
square miles under cultivation, and more than 
one-half of this area is given over to the culti- 
vation of rice alone. The foreigners in Japan 
number 19,094; the Japanese abroad number 
195,272, of whom 95,000 are residents of the 
United States, or in our colonies. 

After a struggle between the clans of the south : 
the Satsuma, the Choshin, the Tosa and the 
Hizen; and the Tokugawa regime, which had 
been in power for two hundred and fifty years be- 
fore the coming of Commodore Perry, the clans 
and their leaders, with splendid patriotic magna- 
nimity, gave up, ostensibly, not only their pow- 
ers but their wealth; but be it understood they 
retained and still retain an overwhelming influ- 
ence in affairs of state; members of these clans 
fill practically all the offices of importance in 
the state, the army, and the navy. It is still a 
government by an oligarchy, in which nepotism 
plays a large part. The Emperor was once more 
put in a position of real power, and the House 
of Peers and the House of Representatives, con- 



JAPAN 421 

stituting the Imperial Diet of Japan, created by 
the constitution of February, 1889, met for the 
first time in November, 1890. 

The House of Peers is composed of three 
classes: hereditary, comprising the imperial 
princes and the higher nobility, sitting in their 
own right; nominated, comprising persons 
named by the Emperor for services to the state, 
and for their learning; elected, including the 
majority of the peerage, holding their seats for 
seven years, and consisting of a number of vis- 
counts and barons elected by their own orders, 
representatives of the various provinces returned 
subject to the approval of the Emperor, and by 
small electoral bodies composed of the highest 
taxpayers. The House of Peers numbers about 
280 members. 

The House of Representatives numbers 379, 
a fixed number being returned from each elec- 
toral district, the proportion being 1 to about 
127,000. This lower house sits for four years, 
and is bound to meet once every year for at 
least three months. These members are re- 
turned upon a taxpaying, residential, and age 
franchise. The electors must be male Japanese 
subjects of not less than full twenty-five years of 
age. The members of both the House of Peers 
and the House of Representatives receive $1,000 



422 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

a year, besides travelling expenses. This Im- 
perial Diet has control over the finances. Min- 
isters, or oflScials of their departments designated 
by these ministers, sit in the chamber, but only 
at their own option, to defend their departments 
or to answer questions. The Japanese bor- 
rowed their military methods from Germany, 
and their parliamentary model was evidently 
German as well. 

On examining the constitution of these two 
houses it is seen, even by the reader of so slight 
a sketch as this, how preponderating may be the 
control of the Emperor. The ministers or cabi- 
net are nominated by, and are the servants of, 
the Emperor. They are not responsible to the 
Diet, and may remain in office as long as the Em- 
peror so pleases. The government thus legislates 
through two chambers without being responsible 
to either. The lower house is almost of neces- 
sity an opposition. So it has proved itself. 
More than once the government has found itself 
balked and brought to a stand-still. Then the 
still awesome power of the Emperor is called in. 
He sends an imperial message to the recalcitrant 
or truculent members that such unseemly par- 
liamentary conflicts are "likely to disturb the 
spirits of my ancestors," then after a confer- 
ence between the government and the opposition. 



JAPAN 423 

the Budget for the year, let us say, is passed. 
But Hamlet cannot forever be appealing to the 
ghost. There will come a time when the deep 
voice from nowhere will be laughed at and 
flouted; and when the mystic power invoked 
will be analyzed and found to be, as it is, 
vaporous. 

There is no state, no official religion. The 
lower classes are still devoted to their old shrines, 
their old wooden idols, the mandates of their 
ignorant Buddhist and Shinto priests; and they 
still contribute, what for a poor people are enor- 
mous sums, for the maintenance and building 
of shi'ines and temples. 

One of the features of Japanese civilization 
to-day is the bands of pilgrims one sees all 
over the country, from little family parties to 
parties of thousands, on their way to this shrine 
or that, or to Fuji, or some other sacred moun- 
tain. At some of these places prostitutes are 
provided for the pilgrims. This outrages our 
sense of decency and appeals to us as coarse and 
crude blasphemy; but not one Japanese in a 
thousand can even understand such aii attitude 
of mind or such a phase of morality. With us 
this matter of the relation of the sexes is recog- 
nized universally not only as immoral but crimi- 
nal. It is only fair to the Japanese to explain 



424 THE ^^TEST IN THE EAST 

tliat llieir attitude is so distiiiclly different from 
our owii in this matter, that they are no more to 
be judged harshly on this subject than are chil- 
dren who take candy that does not belong to 
them, or who go too near the fire before they 
know that fire burns. There is even no word, 
in Japanese, for male chastity. Every child of 
the present Mikado is the offspring of a concu- 
bine. The Empress has borne no children. 

The upper and educated classes are sceptical, 
or frankly agnostic. At one time the Catholics, 
and at another the Unitarians, sincerely believed 
that Japan was about to become Catholic or 
Unitarian. The Japanese are great nibblers 
intellectually. Their gentleness of manner, and 
apparent receptivity, lead the foreign missionary 
to believe that he is making headway ; and like 
other men he loses no opportunity to proclaim 
his success to his co-religionists at home, only to 
find that mere curiosity was at the bottom of 
the Japanese reception of him and his message; 
and that at the end of a few years the Japanese 
are nibbling as politely, and as smilingly as ever, 
at some other sectarian cheese. Nor are the 
missionaries to blame, for among missionaries it 
would be hard to match the honor-roll of names 
beginning with Francis Xavier, and coming down 
to Verbeck, Brown, Hepburn, and Gale in Korea. 



JAPAN 425 

It is not only in religious and ethical fields, that 
the Japanese wander and browse with no great 
seriousness of purpose. It looked at one time 
as though the Japanese intended to adopt Euro- 
pean costumes, but in 1888 the cry of Japan for 
the Japanese was heard, and there was a revo- 
lution of feeling, and a general change back to 
Japanese dress. Their fads are innumerable. 
They have gone in for rabbits, for cock-fighting, 
for wrestling, for waltzing, for picnics on a grand 
scale, for elaborate funerals, and they discussed 
seriously the question as to whether April Fool's 
Day should be celebrated, all at different times; 
and one after the other these have been neg- 
lected and forgotten, and they have discarded 
one faith or one fad after another, with the 
same nonchalance with which they have changed 
back and forth, to and from the European cos- 
tume. It must not be deduced from this that 
I am criticising the Japanese as an unstable 
people of whims and fancies. These excursions, 
religious, social and sartorial, may be merely 
trial trips in the search for the best. In what I 
write, I try to explain to my countrymen; there 
is no malicious nor mischievous intention to fo- 
ment ill-feeling, nor to excite ridicule; that role 
may best be left to those who count a fleeting and 
sectional popularity as sufficient payment for the 
sale of one's own soul. 



426 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

The one all-pervading influence has ever been, 
and is to-day, nor has it lost its hold altogether 
even upon the sceptics, ancestor- worship : wor- 
ship and service for the ancestors of the family, 
of the clan, and of the Emperor. When the 
woman is married, her name is stricken off the 
records of her father's family, and added to that 
of her husband, and she becomes a worshipper 
of his ancestors; the loyalty to clan and to clan 
ancestors still persists; and, as I have written, 
the loyalty to the Emperor and the imperial an- 
cestry is like our patriotism of the best kind, 
and keeps all the divergent interests submissive, 
and remains still as the last court of appeal. 

The regime of the Shoguns, a word equivalent 
in meaning to the Roman Imperator, which in- 
troduces us to the Japan we know, and which 
lasted from 1600 to 1868, meant 270 Daimyos, 
with their Samurai or noble vassals, and 1,500,- 
000 dependent upon them, and this pinnacle 
supported by a base of what were practically 
30,000,000 serfs. Even thirty years ago not one 
person in ten could afford even rice, but lived on 
barley, or barley and a little rice; now six out of 
ten have a square meal of rice every day. 

It was this arrangement of society which ex- 
plains both the present strength and weakness of 
Japan. Not to remember that these people are 
only just emerging from feudalism, from clan 



JAPAN 427 

government, and that the origins of such ethical 
systems and sanctions as they have, have their 
roots in Confucianism, which is agnostic and 
monarchial, and in the subservient loyalty of 
man to master, and of the Sir Galahad loyalty as 
between brothers in arms, described in their code 
of Biishido, is to leave Japan a sealed book. 

The fierce patriotism animating those who with 
shouts of delight charged again and again over 
lines of their own slain against Russian breast- 
works ; what does it mean ? The patient, smiling 
stoicism ; what does it mean ? The domestic and 
moral slavery of the women ; what does it mean ? 
The commercial chicanery and unconscious con- 
sciencelessness, from the twenty-four members 
of the House of Representatives now in prison 
in connection with the sugar frauds, and the 
First Army Division scandal in regard to tenders 
for new depots, down to the three thousand 
weights and measures captured by the police of 
Tokio, in a simultaneous raid upon the dealers 
in rice; what does it mean ? The self-sacrificing 
patriotism, and simple honorable living of Prince 
Ito, and other men like him; what does it mean ? 
The jump, from knights in chain armor, with 
two-handled swords, to the latest fashion in 
dreadnoughts, and this in one generation; what 
does it mean ? A constitution, an army, a navy. 



428 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

a complete school system and miles of progress 
along the road of mdustrial and commercial 
competition, the defeat of one great European 
power, and an alliance with the greatest power 
of all, the British Empire; what does it all mean ? 

The gains are so gigantic, the changes have 
been so swift, the child has become so surrepti- 
tiously a strong man, that enthusiasts shout: a 
miracle! Poets praise without stint and with 
facts wreathed in the flowers of rhetoric; and 
travellers interpret the bows and smiles of shop- 
keepers and Geisha girls into a national certifi- 
cate for courtesy; and readers in foreign lands 
either shiver in fear of the "Japanese Peril," or 
are hypnotized into believing that here at last 
is the new heaven and the new earth of the Book 
of Revelations. A world-wide false impression of 
Japan has been given by the eclogues of Euro- 
pean visitors, whose opinions would be more 
valuable had they seen less of her women and 
known more of her men. Cant is not peculiar 
to the Puritan; the Cavaliers, the literary Cav- 
aliers, have a cant of their own. 

However easily satisfied the rest of the world 
may be, with fantastic and superficial explana- 
tions and descriptions of the origins, and the 
present status, and the probable results of this 
Japanese civilization, we Americans are vitally 



JAPAN 429 

concerned to know as much as we can of nothing 
but the truth. What has most impressed the 
world is the suddenly developed military prowess 
of the Japanese. The victory over the Chinese 
is a negligible laurel. The Chinese are a people 
who have idealized for centuries the student and 
the merchant, and despised the warrior. Chi- 
nese of seventy are still proud to be going up 
for examinations that for fifty years they have 
failed to pass. Even an unsuccessful student is 
of more importance than a successful soldier. 
This situation is only now beginning to change 
slowly. 

The victory over the Russians was an incon- 
clusive victory. Nearly 900,000 Russians were 
securely intrenched, and more were coming into 
northern Manchuria, when peace terms were 
concluded at Portsmouth. Between March 31, 
1904, and March 31, 1907, the national debt of 
Japan increased from $280,000,000 to the enor- 
mous amount of $1,135,000,000; and Russia 
declined even to negotiate unless any con- 
sideration of an indemnity was waived; and 
Russia paid nothing, ceded no territory of her 
own, what she relinquished belonged to China, 
and lost nothing but prestige, for which she 
seemed to care nothing. This war cost the 
Japanese $1,000,000,000; 85,000 killed, and 



430 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

over 600,000 casualities. A drawn battle with 
the Japanese did not seem to Russia then, and 
from what one hears in Russia to-day, does not 
seem to them now, as a matter of much conse- 
quence. Had it not been for the condition of 
her domestic poHtical affairs, she would not have 
consented even to appear at Portsmouth, for she 
knew, as the chancellories of all Europe knew, 
that Japan was at her last gasp financially. 

The alliance with Great Britain may have 
been a good stroke of diplomacy for Great 
Britain at the time; but it was a short-sighted 
policy, and the British are by no means so in 
love with the alliance now, as then, when they 
considered it a supreme blow at any Russian 
threatening of their frontiers in India. And it 
is well known now that a Japanese alliance was 
hawked about the continent before it was ac- 
cepted by Great Britain. 

It is easy to see that the organization of an 
army, that military prowess, are the line of least 
resistance for a people with the past history of 
the Japanese. It was comparatively easy to 
convert the fighting feudalism of earlier days 
into the terms of a modern navy and army. 
What Wellington said of the playing-fields of the 
great English public-schools, and the result at 
Waterloo, may be said as justifiably of Btishido, 



JAPAN 431 

and the battle of the Yalu River. I have no 
wish to detract from the merit of Japanese mili- 
tary success, I merely call attention to the fact 
that it has its roots, and well-defined ones, in the 
past, and is not a military Cinderella, as the 
fairy-story writers on modern Japan would lead 
one to believe. Eveiybody agrees to praise the 
obedience, the discipline and the courage of the 
Japanese soldier. 

But now comes the diiKcult task, and along 
the lines of the hardest resistance, which is to 
convert this clan system, which despised com- 
merce and industry, which taught its youth that 
"trade is the only game where the winner Is 
disgraced," into commercial and industrial effi- 
ciency. Just as everybody agrees to praise the 
Japanese as a soldier, so everybody agrees to 
question the honesty of the Japanese as a trader. 
My own reception in Japan, the constant hos- 
pitality shown me there, the intelligent and cour- 
teous gentlemen who helped me and entertained 
me there, make it hard to understand the causes 
of the bitter hostility to the Japanese, not on our 
Western coast only, but all through the East, in 
which I had been travelling for many months. 

It is only when you leave the high official, the 
kindly and considerate host, the travelled and 
cosmopolitan Japanese, and hear tales of the 



432 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Japanese as they are; see them as they are, at 
the temples or in the public gardens; in the 
crowded narrow streets of Kioto, for example; 
at the railway stations; in the railway carriages, 
hawking, spitting, smoking, scattering ashes, 
until the carriage floor looks like an elongated 
cuspidor; at the entrances and exits of the 
theatres ; at the booths and side-shows of a fair, 
or around a popular temple ; crowded in a tram- 
car; or when you deal with subordinates at a 
bank, post-oflSce, railway station, or telegraph 
oflBice ; then you realize how and why, practically 
the people of all nations who have constant 
dealings with them, from ambassadors to travel- 
ling salesmen, have grown to hate them with an 
untempered zeal. Their fussy and self-conscious 
politeness; their comical vanity and self-satis- 
faction; their parochial assumption that all the 
w^orld is wrong, they alone right; their lack 
of consideration for others, particularly for their 
women ; their callow and sophisticated youthf ul- 
ness; the lack of personal dignity, and in its 
place a chip-on-the-shoulder assertiveness ; their 
new feeling of a scarcely veiled contempt for the 
white race, which, by the way, is not even veiled 
among the Chinese; all these characteristics, 
overlaid with a lacquer of hardness and a 
national selfishness which no European ever 



JAPAN 433 

penetrates — even poor Lafcadio Hearn learned 
it to his cost before he died — account to some 
extent for this extraordinary shift of opinion 
upon the part of Europeans, from condescend- 
ing fondness, to virulent and loudly expressed 
contempt. 

But why, the intelligent reader will ask, have 
travellers and writers for years praised the gen- 
tleness, the courtesy, the almost primeval hon- 
esty, the patience of these people ; their painstak- 
ing workmanship of swords, lacquers, carvings, 
porcelains, iron-work, to turn upon them now 
with all manner of insult and suspicion for their 
industrial, commercial and moral standards. 
It does not seem to me a difficult question to 
answer. 

The craftsmen of Japan, in the old days, 
worked for their lords or their rich and noble 
patrons. They were protected, supported and 
praised, not paid, for their work ; it was a labor 
of love. Buyers and sellers, and hawkers and 
traders, were a despised class. The Japanese, 
too, have had practically no personal liberty as 
we know it. Their work, profession, status and 
habitat were fixed; and even small crimes were 
punished with death. Their amusements were 
simple, their holidays spent as Watteau's shep- 
herds and shepherdesses spent theirs, and they 



434 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

were to a man under the thumb of elan rulers, 
and without opportunity for moral vagaries, or 
personal choice, in the matter of habits and 
customs. Everybody worked for some house- 
hold, and every household worked for some 
clan. A man was obliged by law, in feudal 
times, to earn his living, to marry, to bring up 
his family and to die, in the place where he was 
born ; and even to-day it is expected, and is gen- 
erally the custom, though such restrictions are 
rapidly passing. The loosening of family bonds, 
the greater liberty of the individual, mean little 
to us, perhaps, as we read of it; but in Japan it 
means the lessening of the restraining power of 
religion itself. A nation of ancestor-worshippers 
depend upon the integrity of the family life for 
all their moral as well as religious sanctions; 
and the growth of individualism in Japan was 
sure to be followed by a certain moral laxity. 
We are seeing that to-day. To do away with 
the family cult of each family's ancestors is to do 
away with religion, is to do away with the great 
spiritual restraining and warning hand, which 
had kept moral irregularities in abeyance. It 
was the civilization of a jelly-mould. Of a 
sudden the mould is broken. Each must take 
care of himself, each must make a living for 
himself, each must fend and fight for himself. 



JAPAN 435 

each must learn to make and to spend money. 
It is a poor country, the natural wealth of the 
country is small, and it is overcrowded; com- 
petition is severe, and the old rule of unques- 
tioning loyalty is everywhere lessening; and the 
new laws of economic competition, both at home 
and abroad, come into existence, and there fol- 
lows chaos. 

On top of this come w^ar, prestige, praise, alli- 
ance with the mightiest, and overwhelming na- 
tional debts; and there follow self-satisfaction, 
vanity and self -consciousness. Japan suffers 
from being the novus homo among the nations. 
She has not our morals, our manners, our dress, 
our religion, our familiarity with wealth and lux- 
ury, our tastes in art, literature or music, none 
of our European traditions in short, or our fa- 
miliarity with the written or spoken languages 
of ancient and modern culture and civilization. 
This nation, which in its own clothes, in its own 
home, and in familiar surroundings, and living 
by its own moral code, was dubbed graceful, 
polite, gentle and unassuming, is now, because 
judged by an entirely different standard, awk- 
ward, unmoral, self-conscious, bumptious and 
dishonest. 

One sometimes sees an individual of one na- 
tion who wishes to appear to be of another. 



436 THE W^ST IN THE EAST 

There was a time when the Englishman was 
proud to be deemed *'Italianated," or to be 
called the *' Mirror of Tuscany"; and there are 
Englishmen to-day who vaunt the civilization 
of France as higher than their own. There are, 
alas, Americans who emigrate, socially and na- 
tionally, to London or to Paris, and who ape 
the accent, the manner and what they deem by 
an entirely mistaken view to be the sedulous 
anxiety of the Englishman to avoid intercourse 
with whomsoever is great-grandfatherless. Try- 
ing to be superficially w^hat essentially one is 
not, is an awkward business, and these her- 
maphrodite patriots are ridiculous abroad and 
a mortification at home. In the case of the 
Japanese, the whole nation is trying to appear 
to be what it is not; they are trying to do things 
that are not natural to them; trying to assume 
an equality with others along lines that are 
foreign to them; and although these efforts are 
prodigious, and here and there successful, the 
general result cannot help being slightly ridic- 
ulous. There was no exaggeration in the old 
praise, there is no exaggeration in the new 
blame. 

To insist upon building the Antung-Mukden 
railway into a broad-gauge road, amply serv- 
iceable for troops and freight, if the words of a 



JAPAN 437 

treaty mean anything, was taking a mean advan- 
tage of the Chinese. The concession for the 
construction of the Chinchow-Aigun railway, 
America making the loan to China, and an 
English firm contracting to build the road, was 
held up on a protest from Japan. Why China, 
an unconquered and independent nation, should 
not be allowed to build a railway, controlled 
and owned by the state, and far removed from 
any Japanese interest, it is hard to understand. 
England declines to assist the project in any 
way. England is for the moment interna- 
tionally supine. She is fully occupied with the 
tearing at her domestic vitals of a demagogue- 
fed, and demagogue-bred, class war, which a 
knot of recalcitrants, who have paid for admis- 
sion with money they have begged in a foreign 
country, watch, with their thumbs turned down 
to every appeal for fair-play. England's attitude 
is apparently that China is to have no rights as 
over against her ally Japan's wishes. At Hong- 
chow, when I was in China, the Japanese were 
trading in the interior in spite of specific treaties 
forbidding it, and when ordered away by the 
Chinese governor, were leaving with impudent 
reluctance. 

Three treaties define Japan's position in 
Manchuria: I. the Anglo- Japanese treaty of 



438 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

August, 1905; II. the Portsmouth treaty of 
September, 1905; III. the China- Japan treaty 
of December, 1905. Japan subscribes in all of 
these treaties to the policy of the open door in 
Manchuria, but is doing her best to make all 
things easy for Japanese enterprise and com- 
merce, and the reverse for every other nation. 

Though the Chinese and Japanese cannot 
understand each other's speech, they can read 
each other's writing or ideographs. This helps 
the Japanese in their honest trade with the Chi- 
nese very materially, because labels, addresses, 
firm marks, and brands are made easily plain; 
but it helps also in the forgery of patent marks, 
labels, and brands, and this has become an occa- 
sional feature of Japanese commercial methods. 

Half an hour's walk in Tokio, writes the Brit- 
ish ambassador, will discover ten to twenty imita- 
tions of British trade-marks. One may buy all 
over China to-day the English Rodgers's razors, 
made in Japan. More than one Chinese news- 
sheet is edited and controlled by Japanese; 
and these are the sheets which are loudest in 
their demands for the driving out of China of 
the foreigner. At the final meeting of the Nip- 
pon Syndicate, Limited, in London, the chair- 
man said that the reason for the winding up of 
the company's aftairs was due, he regretted to 



JAPAN 439 

say, "to the wide-spread unreliability of the 
Japanese nation in commerce, no less than to 
the reluctance of our allies to admit British 
enterprise to any share of the resources of the 
Far East. The selfish policy of the Japanese 
had reduced the doctrine of the open door to 
nothing more or less than a fiction." The 
Japanese consul himself, in Tientsin, reported 
to his government that "the Chinese regard 
Japanese goods with serious distrust as being 
cheaply and badly packed and not up to sample." 
While in India I heard of a large amount of 
money involved in the suit of an Indian exporter 
from Japan, who claimed that he had been 
shamefully deceived by the difference between 
samples and the cotton goods received. One of 
our American school-books was stolen bodily 
and reprinted in Japan. The American pub- 
lishers, through our State Department, remon- 
strated. The Japanese reply was that the book 
was not the same, because they had corrected 
certain verbal errors in the original! 

The new Japanese tariff comes into force on 
July 1, 1911. The average of new duties on 
British goods is estimated at an advance of 
two-thirds upon existing rates. On goods from 
other countries the increase in the average of 
the duties is about fifty per cent. But, says 



440 THE WEST IN THE Ex\ST 

Count Komura, the Foreign Secretary of Japan, 
in an official statement of Japanese policy: 
** Great Britain has what is called a free-trade 
policy; there is no room for a convention with 
that country." This is frank cynicism enough, 
one would think, to penetrate the British com- 
mercial understanding. If this is not enough, 
the new tariff increases the duties on printed 
goods from eight pence to twenty-two pence; 
on white shirtings the duty is nearly quadru- 
pled, and on cotton Italians the increase is even 
greater. 

In spite of the alliance, the British community 
in Japan does not receive the "most-favored- 
nation" treatment, but its members are re- 
garded as undesirable aliens, as are the repre- 
sentatives of other nations ; and now in addition 
the tariff wall against British goods has been 
raised to an almost unclimbable height. 

The total of Japanese imports and exports in 
1868 amounted to $13,123,272; in 1904 to 
$303,318,980; and in 1908 to $407,251,500. It 
may be that the Japanese now believe that they 
can afford to look upon their alliance with 
Great Britain as a favor bestowed rather than 
as a favor received. They have got out of it the 
peace and protection they needed in a time of 
great strain; their army and navy they assume. 



JAPAN 441 

some of their high officials even claim as much, 
are more needed by Great Britain than is Great 
Britain's protection by Japan, and therefore 
they can now deal with Great Britain on even 
terms. This may or may not be good diplo- 
macy, wise commercial methods. With that I 
have nothing to do. I cite it as a national ex- 
ample of the same spirit which pervades their 
dealings as individuals. Whatever else it may 
be, it is not "playing the game." 

Even their hospitality is suspicious beneath 
its outward graciousness. Very few Americans 
know, when the American fleet was welcomed 
with loud acclaims of friendliness at Yokohama, 
that all the rest of the Japanese ships and men 
were mobilized near Nagasaki and kept there, 
even depriving men of leave, till the American 
fleet sailed away. This is of the type of frank 
friendliness which leads Japanese officers to 
run between the shafts of a jinrickishaw in order 
to listen to the conversation of the foreign 
officers they draw. Somehow these strike us as 
the degrading precautions of a morally vulgar 
and low type of civilization. These things are 
not easy for us to understand, or to dismiss with 
a smile, except of contempt. 

I could fill this chapter, and many chapters, 
with example after example of the untrustwor- 



442 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

thiness of the Japanese merchants , and indus- 
trials. I have cited instances merely to show 
the reader that this accusation is not gossip. 
But I have little taste for accusations, and no 
enmity against the Japanese, for I cannot pict- 
ure a kindlier hospitality than I received. This 
is all by way of explanation, as is much that 
is to follow, and by no means a tirade; and 
also because it is quite fair, and high time, that 
we dropped the songs of the nursery and dis- 
cussed Japan by the grown-up standards, by 
which she now claims the right to be judged. 

We have come to believe in the West, that no 
progress along moral lines can be attained with- 
out putting women on the same level of moral 
and mental opportunity with men. Without 
respect for womanhood we believe that men can- 
not respect themselves, and that the degradation 
of women means the degradation of men. The 
Japanese neither believe this nor act upon it. 
During the seven years, 1890-1897, there were 
2,450,838 marriages in Japan, 821,121 divorces, 
and 523,992 illegitimate births. Prostitution in 
Japan is regulated, controlled and taxed by the 
state. The last census gives the number of 
females in Japan as 23,131,207; of this number, 
7,587,979 are between the ages of fifteen and 
thirty-five, or roughly the age when the Eastern 



JAPAN 443 

woman is physically attractive. One writer 
claims that there are "500,000 public prosti- 
tutes, and at least 1,000,000 daruma and meshi- 
mori,^ etc., etc.; the total of women practising 
prostitution is probably 1,400,000, and if to this 
again about 500,000 Geisha be added, the com- 
plete grand total cannot be short of nearly 
2,000,000." It seems impossible that this can 
be true, though I have figures from an official 
in the Finance Department, who procured them 
from the Home Department, which confirm this 
estimate. But even if it were cut in half, and 
this is an absurd underestimate, it shows that of 
all the women in Japan between the ages of fif- 
teen and thirty-five, one out of every seven and a 
half is thus employed. It is true, at all events, 
and every traveller with eyes to see may investi- 
gate for himself, that the whole eastern coast 
from Zanzibar to Kamtschatka is fringed with 
Japanese prostitutes. In Bombay, Calcutta, 
Hongkong, Singapore, Shanghai, and so on all 
around the coast, this Japanese export is promi- 
nent. The Japanese authorities recognize this 
and are trying to stop this emigration of young 
women, which is a standing disgrace to them, 
along 15,000 miles of sea-coast. 

* Japanese words used in the provinces and meaning prcfcuresses, 
or low-class Conciliatrices. 



444 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

It is a not uncommon thing for a Japanese 
girl to sell herself at home or abroad, to gain 
the money with which to marry and settle 
down, the future husband agreeing to this man- 
ner of gaining the marriage portion. As I 
have noted, the Emperor sets the example by 
giving his people an heir to the throne born of 
a concubine ; and no Japanese, of whatever posi- 
tion in society, would hesitate to take one, or 
as many as were necessary of these women, into 
his household to procure a son to continue the 
ancestor-worship. A Japanese nobleman, well 
known as a diplomat in Europe and in this 
country, in discussing this question with me, 
remarked: "What a fine thing if you had in 
your country a descendant of George Washing- 
ton!" He intimated, too, that in his country 
the whole question was treated as a matter of 
practical hygiene, just as we provide a pure- 
food law, while in England and in America we 
balked at dealing with the matter frankly and 
wisely, and treated it like hypocrites. He was 
right up to a certain point, for there are no streets 
paraded by soliciting women in Tokio as are 
Piccadilly, London; certain streets in New York; 
the Boulevards, and the shambles of Mont- 
martre, in Paris. In Japan the laws are strin- 
gent upon this subject, and the punishment for 



JAPAN 445 

illegal use of houses is a heavy fine and impris- 
onment. The women are segregated in certain 
districts, and are regularly taxed and visited. 

The three laws for Japanese women are obedi- 
ence to father and mother as a child; obedience 
to husband as a wife; finally obedience to her 
children as an old woman. The women are 
gentle, fertile, and obedient; and it is disconcert- 
ing to the logical mind to find that their most 
fervent admirers are to be found among our 
American women, who are considered by all the 
world to be sophisticated and independent, and 
by that unanswerable critic, the Census, to be 
rapidly losing the position they ought to hold in 
the birth-rate column. 

If the American woman knew that every inn, 
every tea-house and every hotel, and many of 
the temples in Japan offered easy virtue to every 
traveller and pilgrim so disposed; and that the 
sale of herself by the woman, to relieve family 
necessities, is looked upon as a worthy self- 
sacrifice in thousands of Japanese households; 
if she could see the whole Japanese attitude 
toward this question, both at home and abroad, 
she would consider the admission of the Japan- 
ese in any numbers into this country, to be edu- 
cated side by side with our children, in the pub- 
lic schools, as an intolerable suggestion. And 



446 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

she would consider that to permit freedom of so- 
cial intercourse between Japanese men and the 
young women of America an insulting sugges- 
tion. Even when Japanese gentlemen entertain, 
professional women are called in for the occa- 
sion. It will be time to talk of offering the 
freedom of our guarded and cherished homes to 
the Japanese, when the Japanese have our ideals 
of what such a home ought to be. 

Our Western coast is right, and not till victory 
over our forces on sea and land brings them, will 
the Japanese be permitted to colonize in any 
part of America, until her civilization is purged 
and changed in this respect. Far be it from me 
to sit in judgment over the nations of the earth, 
to claim that we are right and others wrong; 
and I trust that the reader will realize that I 
have been stating facts, noting differences, and 
not offering ponderous protocols, as though the 
possession of a pen produced omniscience. I 
should be sorry to be included in that category 
of travellers, and writers about other countries, 
who look upon every difference, every incon- 
venience, every displeasing incident as a griev- 
ance. I look upon them not as grievances, but 
as experiences, and I try to deal with them as 
such, for my own benefit, and that of my 
countrymen. 



JAPAN 447 

It was only recently and after a valiant fight, 
led by the members of the European Salvation 
Army in Japan, and at the risk of personal vio- 
lence to themselves, that the shameful slavery to 
which the inmates of the Yoshiwara^ or Prosti- 
tutes' Quarter, were subjected, was mitigated; 
and women who wished to escape were given the 
opportunity to do so. Before the Japanese 
woman is allowed to stand securely upon the 
rhetorical pedestal built for her by Lafcadio 
Hearn, and accepted as appropriate to her moral 
and social status by indifferent and superficial 
travellers, she must be judged by other standards, 
and with evidence furnished by less frankly 
partial witnesses. 

The total net debt of the United States, that 
is, what remains after deducting the cash in the 
Treasury, was, on June 30, 1908, $938,132,409. 
About $155,000,000 was paying at the rate of 
four per cent, the balance two or three per cent. 
The estimated value of property in the United 
States in 1904 was estimated at $107,104,- 
192,410. 

The debt of Japan, one of the poorest coun- 
tries in the world, with more than one-half of its 
cultivated area given over to the raising of rice, 
was, on March 31, 1908, $1,138,173,226, and 
the internal loans pay from five to eight per 



448 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

cent, and the foreign loans from four to six per 
cent.* 

A Japanese writer, Adaclii Kinnosuke by 
name, writes: "People in Japan with $50,000 
a year or more are asked to hand over to the 
government $34,000 of it. Wonderful, is it not ? 
More wonderful still, they say nothing about it. 
Of course it is graded down so that a man with 
$500 yearly income pays about seventeen per 
cent. On an average the people of Japan pay 
about thirty per cent of their net income in taxa- 
tion in one form or another — a taxation which 
would create a revolution in Europe or America 
in twenty-four hours." This Japanese writer, 
who is apparently proud of this situation in his 
own country, might have gone further and said, 
not only that there would be a revolution in 
Europe and America, but also that our present 
freedom, our religious and political liberty, have 

*THE EXPENDITURES OF JAPAN IN YEN 

1901 266,856,824 

1905 420,741,735 

1910 534,303,861 

THE TAXES OF JAPAN IN YEN 

1901 135,652,181 

1905 264,624,842 

1910 320,225,718 

THE NATIONAL DEBT OF JAPAN IN YEN 

1901 496,765,040 

1905 2,082,582,822 

1910 2,331,090,448 



JAPAN 449 

been won by revolutions in the past, to enable 
us to escape from just such tyrannical taxation. 
The oligarchical clan government of Japan is 
bleeding people to death to provide an army 
and navy, and for the conduct of war. A little 
historical knowledge would have shown this 
gentleman that we do not envy him, and that 
Magna Charta, Charles the First, the French 
Revolutions, and the American Revolution are 
incidents in the combined history of Europe and 
America to prove it. 

In his treatment of the case the slight premise 
IS assumed that we should all be better off if we 
were Japanese! Hearn's brief for the Japanese 
women omits the same corner-stone in the build- 
ing of his monument. The Japanese have 
reached a phase of megalomania, where they 
fancy that the rest of the world looks upon them 
with awe and envy. No one who has not talked 
day after day with the Japanese appreciates this. 
Many of them, as is the case with Mr. Adachi 
Kinnosuke, hold up their hands and say: 
"Wonderful, is it not.^" It is barely possible 
that we do not think it wonderful at all, that 
on the contrary we think it deplorable. It is 
barely possible that we prefer American to 
Japanese standards; American to Japanese 
morality ; American to Japanese women ; Amer- 



450 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ican to Japanese national debt and taxation; 
American to Japanese civilization; and Ameri- 
can to Japanese estimation in the eyes of the 
world. As an American I should be mortified to 
think that my country, my country's institutions, 
my countrymen or my countrywomen, could be 
confounded for a moment with the Japanese. 

We escaped from the slavery of feudalism 
many years ago. Japan is as much in the grip 
of the feudal baron and feudal methods to-day 
as she was in the days of the Shogunate. Their 
Emperor is not a constitutional ruler, but a god, 
a puppet-king, as a high Japanese ojfficial has 
called him; their House of Representatives has 
little more final voice in policy and legislation 
than have the Boy Scouts upon American policy 
and legislation; the Japanese are not taxed, 
they are robbed, as were our ancestors when 
they were serfs and villeins. If we retrograded 
to such taxation as obtains in Japan, it would 
be because it could not be helped, as is the case 
in Japan to-day. We are not in the stage of 
civilization where there is nothing to be bought 
with money but rice, sake. Geisha girls, and the 
favor of Shinto or Buddhist temple-servers; if 
we were, we might not crave wealth, might in- 
deed rejoice to be soldiers, as a relief from pov- 
erty and monotony. 



JAPAN 451 

Though life in Japan is not monotonous to 
the Japanese, for they are distinctly a bright, 
cheerful and happy people, it would be burden- 
somely monotonous to us. Their women are 
docile housewives, who spend next to nothing 
upon themselves, and know nothing of liberty or 
luxury. They take no part in the social en- 
joyments and hospitalities of their husbands, 
who when they can afford it, call in the aid of a 
restaurant, and Geisha girls, when they entertain. 
Neither men nor women have the countless in- 
terests of literature, art, theatres, sports, games, 
travel, charity, religious societies, clubs, which 
make the poorest of us love our independence. 

It is not worth gambling, with your soul as 
stake, to win the whole world of Japan, because 
to the Westerner, be he right or wrong in his 
appreciation, the whole world of Japan is not 
worth having, at the price of their present sla- 
very. We must wait till luxury comes and 
wealth; the cry of their women for liberty and 
something approaching equality of opportunity; 
strikes and the organization of labor ; the escape 
of the members of the Imperial Diet from the 
sway of a puppet-king endowed with ghostly 
powers; the awakening of the nation to the 
pleasures and opportunities of life as we know 
them; we must wait till then. 



452 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

They have not been tested as yet with the real 
temptations of power ; with the strain and stress 
of representative government ; with the poisonous 
vapors of prosperity; with the demands and ex- 
pectations of the superficially educated ; with the 
unpatriotic lawlessness of millions of aliens ; with 
masses of people under no religious restraint. 
No devil has taken them up into the high moun- 
tain of civilization, and shown them the king- 
doms of the world and tempted them; and until 
that time comes, the Japanese must be con- 
sidered as still in the making, and outside of 
any but a hypothetical judgment. 

They took their religion, their Confucian code 
of ethics, their art, their alphabet even, all that 
they have, indeed, from India, China, and Korea. 
They adopted them, but they have not improved 
them. They have no porcelain, no painting, no 
carving, no literature, no ethical code, no religion 
which are improvements upon what they imi- 
tated. Their past is a copy of the East, their 
present is a copy of the West. They have imi- 
tated our mills, machines, arms and instruments, 
but no Japanese even would claim that they have 
invented anything of their own, or improved upon 
the Western models. It is evident that a man 
who can only imitate must always remain behind. 

There is one department of modern life where 



JAPAN 453 

the mere imitator must necessarily find great 
difficulties, and that is in the department of 
government, especially the governing of other 
races far away from one's own country. The 
mere machinery of government may suffice at 
home, where all men by centuries of conformity 
have adjusted themselves, but no machinery is 
enough to make the governing of alien races easy. 
The machinery then becomes subordinate to 
those who use it, adapt it, fit it to daily exigen- 
cies, and adjust it nicely to other habits, customs, 
and prejudices. Whatever else w^e may have 
added to the fund of the stored-up experience 
of civilization, our race may claim an easy pre- 
eminence in this domain. Here, at any rate, 
we have earned the right to look on with a 
critical eye, at the endeavors of other governors, 
whether they be French or Japanese. 

We may claim, too, that there is no higher test 
of a man's all-round ability, and no fairer test of 
a nation's claim to greatness, than the individ- 
ual's or the nation's prowess in this field of effort. 
Whether he be a country parson, the manager of 
a great railroad, or the governor of a wide prov- 
ince, inhabited by millions of an alien race, he 
ranks among the men of unusual powers in his 
degree w^ho succeeds in adjusting differences; 
harmonizing conflicting aims ; gaining confidence 



454 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

by his cheerful but unbending justice; solving 
problems by superior wisdom; gaining the al- 
legiance of warring factions, and leading all alike 
along the path he has marked out for himself 
and them; while the greatest rulers, men like 
Clive and Cromwell and Lincoln, rank with the 
few shining ones in war, art and literature, as 
the prize products of humanity. 

Japan has not gained the respect, the con- 
fidence, or the quiet control of Formosa, Korea, 
or lower Manchuria. In all the months I was 
in India I never saw a white man ill-use a brown 
one; I did not visit Formosa, but the Japanese 
are burning villages and shooting down the na- 
tives there as I write. I did travel through the 
whole length of Korea, crossed the Yalu River, 
and travelled through the whole length of the 
Japanese sphere of influence in Manchuria, and 
never a day passed that I did not see rough and 
often violent treatment of Koreans and Manchus 
by Japanese soldiers, police, and the lower class 
of labor employed there. It is fair to say that 
the late Prince Ito, and the present Consul- 
General of Korea, and all the many Japanese 
officials whom I met, were heartily in accord, 
and sincerely in earnest, in their endeavors to 
do away with these rough and bullying methods, 
but they have not succeeded in preventing them. 



JAPAN 455 

The Japanese of all classes, high and low, are 
painfully sensitive to ridicule. In their own 
country, in the past, their military traditions, 
the closely drawn limitations between classes, 
the prompt vengeance of slight or insult, made 
the rules of politeness to one another as rigid, 
and their ceremonious treatment of one another 
as elaborate, as religious rubrics. 

Both the Koreans and the Chinese look upon 
the Japanese as inferior. The Koreans call 
them "island savages," *' foreign knaves," and 
their country "Contemptible Dwarf Land," and 
the Chinese call them "monkeys," and both 
consider them as even more contemptible than 
Europeans. 

I grant that it has a tendency to make a man 
self-conscious, and awkward, and inclined to 
self-assertion, when he finds himself in a com- 
pany that is latently unfriendly, even if he be a 
superior person of long training in self-control. 

I have seen both Manchus and Koreans make 
fun of the little Japanese soldiers and policemen, 
and it is perhaps not to be wondered at that they 
retaliate with physical force. They do not like 
chaff, and do not know how to take it; and they 
are very new, one may even say, very raw, at 
the business of exercising authority. The white 
man, indeed the gentleman everywhere, assumes 



456 THE ^^^ST IN THE EAST 

his authority, he does not assert it. But one 
must be very sure of oneself to do this success- 
fully, and the Japanese are not sure of them- 
selves by any means. Almost any Japanese is 
delighted to be mistaken for a European, puts 
himself indeed to great pains to imitate his 
institutions, his clothes, his manners, his hab- 
its, and to learn his language, and has none of 
the Chinese indifference to, and contempt for. 
Western standards of civilization. 

No man ever does anything \yell if he is for- 
ever looking out of the cornei of his eye to see 
if he is copying his model successfully. The 
Japanese give you the impression of watching 
to see if you think they have done things the 
way they ought to be done, whether it is eating 
their dinner, drinking their wine, tying their cra- 
vats, choosing their hats and coats, or governing 
their colonies. This uneasiness about their own 
manners and methods, about their right to the 
pre-eminence that they have claimed, cannot be 
concealed from those they are attempting to rule; 
and as I have said elsewhere, the nervous rider 
makes the excitable horse. 

This governing of aliens demands a superior 
all-round man, and one who possesses in par- 
ticular great nervous staying power. The con- 
stant pin-pricks, the malicious misinterpreta- 



JAPAN 457 

tions, the steady opposition, the daily and 
studied efforts at circumvention, are irritating 
and nerve-racking. Even the stoHd EngHsh- 
man in India finds it health-destroying. It has 
had the effect upon some of the stout little 
Japanese of breaking them down, making ner- 
vous wrecks of them. I know of more than one 
Japanese oflScial recalled already from these 
new colonies, completely broken down nervously. 
Men who could stand the gruelling hardships of 
a winter campaign in Manchuria, and lose no 
weight even, waste away under the burdens of 
the complicated business of governing peaceably. 
Fighting is merely an exciting form of exercise, 
but governing is the very rarest accomplishment 
of the most highly trained men, of the most 
advanced civilizations. 

The disease known to us as beri-beri, and 
called by the Japanese Kake, which is a malady 
of the nerves, resulting in paralysis and numb- 
ness, is common in Japan. It played such 
havoc in both army and navy that its causes 
have been seriously investigated. In the navy, 
after certain experiments, the surgeon-general 
prescribed a change of diet, giving the men 
more meat, bread, vegetables, and less rice. It 
may be of interest to our Uptonian school of re- 
formers and their allies, the social and political 



458 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Saprophagans, to learn that Chicago canned 
meat was added to the daily rations of the Jap- 
anese navy and army, and helped to stamp out 
this dread disease. 

The Japanese copy quickly, but they learn, 
which is quite another thing, slowly. Accord- 
ing to the present school system, a boy enters the 
primary school at the age of six, and stays six 
years; at the age of twelve he goes to a middle 
school where he stays five years; at seventeen 
he goes to the high-school for three years, and 
thence to the university for a three or four years' 
course. If no time is wasted, and there are no 
failures at examinations, a boy may graduate 
from the university at twenty-three or four, but 
most boys are not so fortunate. They are par- 
ticularly weak in mathematics, and a large per- 
centage of the failures throughout the school 
and university courses are in this department. 
The result is that many boys do not finish their 
education before the age of twenty-eight, or 
thirty, even. It is to be remembered that this 
is an Oriental race, and the men are old men at 
fifty. With us, a man who has taken care of 
himself is in his prime at fifty, and the respon- 
sible and onerous work of our Western world is 
done by men between forty-five and seventy. 
We have, the best of us, forty years of usefulness 



JAPAN 459 

between twenty and sixty. The Japanese, with 
exceptions, of course, have twenty-five, between 
the years twenty-five and fifty. If the most 
valuable thing in life is stored-up experience, 
well used, the Japanese, and all Orientals, are 
at a tremendous disadvantage in this respect- 
There are three questions uppermost in the 
minds of intelligent people in regard to the 
Japanese: are they really civilized, have they 
incorporated our civilization, got it in their 
blood, or merely grasped certain features of it 
with their deft hands .^ w^ill the alliance with 
Great Britain be renewed .? are they contem- 
plating, and will they be successful in an attack 
upon us? My own answers to these questions, 
and I have tried to avoid being categorical, w^ill, 
I trust, be found in what I have written. All the 
sober-minded Japanese maintain that not only 
have they adopted our civilization, but that they 
are putting it into a crucible from which will 
emerge a higher form of civilization than that 
to which we have attained in the West. They 
regard the non-renewal of their alliance with 
Great Britain as improbable in the present 
timorous state of mind of British statesmen. 
They were unanimous in telling me, an Ameri- 
can, that war between America and Japan is 
preposterous, impossible for financial and stra- 



460 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

tegical reasons, and that Germany is at the 
bottom of all these false alarms, and mcentives 
to quarrels between her rivals and enemies; 
insisting, and I believe with justice, that Ger- 
many is now in a position where war between 
any other two countries would profit her, weaken 
some rival, and be to her commercial advan- 
tage. 

Few men of importance would willingly make 
war, incite to war, or believe in war. No one 
not crazed by the thought of personal revenge 
would: ''Pour the sweet milk of Concord into 
hell." Those who have seen anything of the 
horrors of war detest it; amateurs in uniform, 
with staff-appointment military titles, may be 
pardoned for wishing to appear as brave as their 
uniforms. 

I was bored by Philippics as a boy in col- 
lege, and my re-reading of the classics after pass- 
ing thirty increased my distaste for them. I 
should be disappointed and sorry to have what 
I write of Japan interpreted as a wholesale 
denunciation, as a swaggering sort of ceterum 
censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. I am no 
sour Cato. 

I am, however, of those who believe that the 
best arguments for peace are those well fur- 
nished with men, arms and ammunition, and 



JAPAN 461 

that the ambassadors from a careless, rich, and 
defenceless country seeking to bring about an 
international court of arbitration, though it is of 
all things most to be desired, must necessarily be 
impotent envoys. 

There is no more doubt that both Germany 
and Japan look with envy upon the rich and 
thinly populated countries of South America, and 
that Japan has entered Manchuria to stay, than 
that Germany and Japan are over-populated. 
The thin mantle of the Prince of Peace conceals 
fang and claw only until the opportunity for 
profit, or the pangs of hunger, induce us to throw 
it off. It would seem that our bureaus of agri- 
culture, our schools of technology are useless 
without Annapolis and West Point. The splen- 
did gift of Mr. Carnegie for the advancement of 
peace does honor to every Christian and to every 
American, but that travelled and intelligent 
gentleman would be the last to advocate the 
sending of emissaries for peace, with the halters 
of disarmament and defencelessness around 
their necks. 

The cost of even the moral progress we have 
made has been terrible; and it is not false 
pride, but protection for our ideals, that bids us 
defend ourselves from what we consider lower 
forms of morals, religion, manners and customs. 



462 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

It is astounding that England and America do 
not see that Japan is Materialism proving its 
efficiency. The Japanese are smiling atheists 
and agnostics, and yet at one time America and 
Europe were hailing with admiration their sanity, 
happiness, morality, and ability. At any rate, 
that attitude means good-by Christianity, and 
the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Exeter Hall, 
must be very frivolous or very ignorant if they 
preach a renewal of the alliance in 1915. These 
people would make Darwin, Spencer, Wallace 
and Haeckel point in triumph. Not one of the 
sanctions or authorities of Christendom has con- 
tributed to their success or to their present 
civilization. It is purely material, touched up 
with ghostly awe of ancestordom. If they and 
their gods, their woman slavery, their historical 
and commercial untrustworthiness, their Ori- 
ental secretiveness and cruelty, their imitative 
militarism, their tyrannical and unrepresenta- 
tive government of themselves and their con- 
quered aliens can be received on equal terms 
by England and America, then Christ is a mere 
ethical luxury, and no more necessary to our 
civilization than the "private god" of my 
Hindu friend in Udaipur. 



XI 



THINGS JAPANESE, KOREAN, AND 
MANCHURIAN 

FROM Hongkong to Yokohama ought not 
to be a long or a disturbed voyage. I 
travelled on rather a small steamer to 
avoid waiting for a large one, and from the mo- 
ment we steamed away from the dock at Hong- 
kong till we were warped alongside at Yoko- 
hama, the description of the sea by Horace, 
'Hnverso mare,'' was fulfilled to the letter. Seven 
days of 'Hnverso mare'' unrelieved by eruptive 
illness, which is a blessing in disguise in such 
situations ; during which time I read for the first 
time in many years, a shelf or so of modern 
novels, made me acquainted at least with the 
opiumonic quality of such literature. These 
days left me also with increased respect for 
Horace as a realist. Verily nothing is so power- 
less as water till it gets into motion ! 

It was a rainy, blustering morning when we 
arrived; and I watched with interest the Japan- 
ese who handled the ropes and cables thrown to 

463 



464 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

them. They were skilful and quick, and some- 
what uncanny in appearance; long arms and 
long bodies on short sturdy legs; long upper lips, 
dark, opaque eyes, and an air of doing what they 
had to do, as of trained animals. No one, I 
imagine, who first comes in contact with the 
Japanese, is not impressed by their unhuman 
appearance, and their mental and moral aloof- 
ness, and difference from any other race of the 
same ability he knows. 

The custom-house examination was prolonged, 
patient and rigorous, but my luggage was passed 
as inoffensive, and, tucked into a jinrickisha w, I 
was trotted off to the hotel. The first glimpse of 
the interior of the hotel told me, as though it had 
been proclaimed by the hotel clerk, that here 
the influence of America is paramount. The 
steam-heat, and the hall filled with rocking- 
chairs, proved it. What combination more 
tempting to physical and mental, and conse- 
quently to moral, degeneration can be made 
than a rocking-chair and a cheap novel in a 
steam-heated room! There they were, includ- 
ing the degeneration; for in one of the chairs 
was an over-plump countrywoman, looking as 
though she were choked by her stays, a novel 
in her hands, and her high heels tapping the 
floor, as the chair swayed back and forth. 



THINGS JAPANESE 465 

Two Japanese in livery take my things to 
my room, and when I arrive a few yards behind 
them, they are both smirking at themselves in the 
mirror. There are many bitter criticisms of the 
Japanese these days, and one of the foremost is 
that they are conceited. That may be, but 
there is another aspect of the case deserving 
mention. They are new at the game of civiliza- 
tion. The grinding monotony of life, which is 
the portion of a great and helpless majority in 
every highly civilized society, has not thrown its 
pall over them as yet. They carry luggage to 
an hotel room, they wait on table, they run 
locomotive engines and trolley-cars, wave flags 
from the crossings at passing trains, bow for- 
eigners in and out of shops, and wait upon them 
from behind counters; they take and sell 
tickets at railway stations, do housework, serve 
as guides and couriers, travel themselves in 
trains and ships, wear uniforms as firemen, 
policemen, soldiers, sailors, teachers, judges, 
school-boys, — Japan has veritably blossomed 
into uniforms — govern colonies as in Formosa, 
Korea and Manchuria, and all with the de- 
lighted alertness, and with sidelong glances at 
themselves in mirrors when opportunity offers, 
as of children playing with new toys. 

The traveller and student of foreign men and 



i66 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

manners, who falls into the error of supposing 
that his personal opinions are necessarily dog- 
mas because they are intolerant, is of no value 
as a guide or teacher. These Japanese maybe 
conceited, but the outstanding feature of their 
society is their delighted interest, their air of 
importance, their solemnity in doing the thou- 
sand and one little things that we have done, 
and seen done so often, that we are tired of 
them, and only do them under the stress of 
compulsion. 

I have seen a Japanese using a telephone, or 
a type-writer, punching tickets at a railway 
gate, waving a flag at a crossing, pointing out 
sights to travellers, with the smiling delight and 
curiosity of a child looking at the inside of a 
watch. I am not sure that this unsophisticated 
attitude toward life is not as worthy as reading 
a novel in a rocking-chair, in a steam-heated 
room. 

Germans complain that the French are con- 
ceited, and prone to ridicule others; Americans 
accuse the English of being conceited ; and as for 
the English, they simmer slowly but constantly 
with amusement at our boasting, our proclama- 
tions, our Fourth-of-July oratory. Perhaps we 
all think the Japanese conceited, because we 
think they ought not to be; assuming that our 



THINGS JAPANESE 467 

ideals and our accomplishments are the only 
proper standards of measurement. None of us 
would be less agreeable for more humility; and 
we should certainly all be gainers if before pass- 
ing judgment upon others, we first studied them 
more carefully. More than half the distrust be- 
tween one another, of the nations of the earth, is 
due to nothing more mysterious than just plain, 
complete, and indifferent ignorance. 

There are two places in every country and 
every city, one where the traveller should spend 
a few hours in studying the mass, the average; 
and in the other the picked few. Those two 
places are the railway stations and the book- 
shops. In Bombay and Calcutta books on the 
French Revolution, on Poland's struggle for 
freedom, Herbert Spencer on Education and 
Ethics were in demand. Here is the list from 
a Japanese book-shop: ''Evolution and Adap- 
tation," Morgan; "Electricity and Magnetism," 
Webster; "Theory of Heat," Cotter; "Dar- 
winism," Wallace; "Pioneers of Science," 
Lodge; "Fruit Growing," Bailey; "Fairy Land 
of Science," Lodge. Mills's "Representative 
Government," a volume of five hundred pages 
in Japanese, has reached its fourth edition. 
When I visited the University at Tokio, the 
President told me that the popular courses 



468 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

among the five thousand students there were 
engineering, medicine, lectures on the physical 
sciences, and law. Rightly or wrongly, they 
have picked out our material successes as best 
worth studying and imitating; and they have 
thrown themselves into the study and practice 
of these things with the enthusiasm and aban- 
don of amateurs, to whom it is all fresh and 
new and exciting. 

It is a commonplace to retail the facts and 
figures of their increased commerce and ship- 
ping, their growing navy, their successfully 
tested army, their use of modern inventions of 
all kinds and the development of mills and fac- 
tories and ship-building plants at Osaka, Yoko- 
hama, Tokio, Kioto, Kobe, Nagasaki, Hako- 
date and elsewhere; and their mining activities 
in Japan, and in Korea and Manchuria as well. 
The important thing to get at is not this 
material advancement that stares one in the face 
everywhere, and which may be found in detail 
in any year-book, but whether it is real and last- 
ing, and whether these amateurs who have 
stepped boldly into the ring have the mental, 
moral and the physically nervous staying power 
to stand the strain of it all. Thus far an oli- 
garchical government has succeeded in transfer- 
ring the old clan allegiance of the Daimyos, and 



THINGS JAPANESE 469 

their followers the Samurai, to the Mikado. 
The same obedience, self-sacrifice and dutiful- 
ness have been relied upon to take up and carry 
on this material and military expansion. The 
personal allegiance has been translated into 
patriotism; but an oflSce stool, the cab of a loco- 
motive-engine, tending mill machinery, building 
railroads and bridges, supervising the tiresome 
routine of commercial transactions, are worlds 
away from serving and fighting for a lord, who 
occupies the position toward his followers of 
both father and ruler. 

Our Western journals have treated the recent 
attempt upon the life of the Japanese Emperor 
as though it were similar in kind and of no 
greater importance than an attempt of the same 
kind upon a Western ruler. It is as different 
as an attemp;. upon the life of the Maharana of 
Udaipur by Hindus, or upon the life of the Pope 
by Catholics, is different from an attempt upon 
the King of Italy by Italians. In the latter case 
it is a mad expression of discontent, in the 
former it is a stab at the heart of a semi-religious 
Hindu potentate, or of Japan's god. What re- 
ligion and a moral code, backed by the united 
sentiments of our best citizens, do to keep us in 
order, this allegiance to the Mikado does for 
Japan. It is an ominous sign indeed if Mills's 



470 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

"Representative Government," or Spencer's 
"Ethics," lias upset the Japanese loyalty, which 
far more than any other factor supplies the driv- 
ing power for their progress and success. It 
seems to have passed unnoticed even, except, I 
believe, by one correspondent of an American 
journal, that a special tribunal was necessary to 
try the case, as the crime was so outside the 
realm of the conceivable in Japan, that no Jap- 
anese court was so constituted as to be availa- 
ble for the trial of such an offence. In another 
chapter, written before this attempt upon the life 
of the Japanese Emperor, I suggested the grave 
danger to orderly social and political progress in 
Japan, once the badly digested rationalism of the 
West succeeds in making inroads among these 
people of superficial political training. They 
are agnostic to begin with, and once the mythical 
cords that have bound them, in blind faith, to 
obedience to the spirits of the ancestors of the 
Mikado are strained and broken, and the in- 
dividual recognizes no law higher than his own 
will, the small knot of elder statesmen who now 
rule Japan will have a serious problem to meet. 
It will not be merely the problem of rationalism 
and anarchy which faces us all; but it will be 
the problem of substituting a new driving power 
for all their militarv, commercial, and industrial 



THINGS JAPANESE 471 

forces, and a new bond to hold the people to- 
gether as a nation. 

The attempt upon the life of the Emperor of 
Japan, led by a Japanese who had studied in 
America, and who had edited a newspaper there, 
is the most momentous thing that has happened 
in Japan in half a century. It strikes at the 
very root of all that makes and keeps Japan a 
nation. It weakens Japan's heart, and dilutes 
the purity and fervor of patriotism at all the 
extremities. A rent has been made in the veil 
hiding the mystery which every Japanese fears, 
worships and obeys, and we superficial ob- 
servers in the West have passed it by without 
so much as an inkling - of its real significance. 
It can only be likened in its effects upon the 
nation to the change of feeling here, if we should 
suddenly become possessed of a craze for matri- 
cide. 

Tokio is only some eighteen miles by train 
from Yokohama. Tokio is spread over a dis- 
proportionate area for its population, and the 
distances when measured by jinrickishaw speed 
are great. It is not a capital city in our sense. 
There are many buildings of stone and streets 
of shops, there are jangling trolley-cars and elec- 
tric lighting, but by far the greater part of the 
area of Tokio is covered with small, cheap houses 



472 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

of the flimsy architecture common in Japan. 
There is an air of unkemptness about the city, 
as of a shabby-genteel town assuming the air of 
greatness and prosperity. But redeeming every- 
thing else at this particular season are the cherry 
trees in full bloom. 

There is nothing quite like these avenues of 
pink blossoms in the streets and in the parks; 
and nothing at all like the national pride and 
pleasure in them, of all the people, old and young, 
and of every social grade. There are pilgrim- 
ages and picnics to the parks and other places 
where the blooms are seen to best advantage. 
The Emperor's garden-party, given in honor of 
the height of the cherry-blossom season, is a 
matter for much coming and going of high oflS- 
cials of state, of much discussion of the weather, 
and of much debate as to the exact day to choose, 
when the blooms will be at their best. It is a 
great function, this garden-party, and the cour- 
tesy of our distinguished ambassador to Japan 
procured me an invitation, which I was obliged 
to decline. The time-table of the Trans-Sibe- 
rian railway and my days, engaged weeks in ad- 
vance, and full at that, prevented my waiting. 
At Kobe, however, I saw a Cherry-Dance, and 
nowhere in the East a more lovely succession 
of scenes in color. 



THINGS JAPANESE 473 

Before the Cherry-Dance in the theatre proper, 
there was a Tea Ceremonial, or Cha No Yu, 
It is claimed that four or five years of training 
and tuition are necessary to arrive at proficiency 
in all the intricacies of this ceremony. In this 
case it lasted an hour. All the innumerable 
utensils for tea-making are brought in and 
placed in position with great solemnity, and with 
much manoeuvring and bowing. The attend- 
ants, or acolytes, are little girls in brilliant ki- 
monos and ohis, all of them painted and pow- 
dered. Finally a gorgeous professional, escorted 
by the whole band of acolytes, her face painted, 
her eyebrows pencilled, her hair oiled and shin- 
ing, and dressed over and around a mass of huge 
combs, clad in a marvellous and, as I was in- 
formed, priceless garment, and embroidered on 
it in gold a splendid yellow dragon five feet 
long, shufl3es into the room and seats herself to 
make the tea. Every move and gesture is cal- 
culated and prescribed, and after countless 
solemn manipulations of the utensils the steam 
rises, the water is poured, the tea is made. The 
guests numbering a hundred or more are 
seated on mats on the floor. After this chief- 
priestess has performed her part, she leaves the 
room, and another woman, clad in similar 
splendor, takes her place and serves the tea. 
The cups are passed by the little girls, who, after 



474 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

handing you your cup, bend down and touch 
the floor with their foreheads, and you are sup- 
posed to do likewise in return. The tea was a 
green powder, of acrid flavor and quite unHke 
the tea served on ordinary occasions in Japan. 
Wherever one goes, to a private house, to a shop, 
to a school, to call on the Minister of War, to 
visit the President of the University, to the 
cavalry school, always, at whatever time of the 
day, tea is served ; an agreeable and wholesome 
custom, for it is little more than a pleasantly 
flavored cup of hot water, and one can hardly 
drink too often or too much of that. 

Having finished our tea, the doors were opened 
and a rush was made for seats in the theatre. 
The Japanese have not adapted their old-time 
courtesy and gentle manners to the new con- 
ditions of a steam and electricity handled popu- 
lation. Such a scramble as these people made 
to get through the narrow door and up the 
narrow stairs! Neither women nor children 
were regarded by the men. At the railway 
stations, in the street-cars, in the shops, on the 
sidewalks where there are any, at restaurants 
and in dining-cars, their lack of consideration, 
their crowding, shoving and loathsome habits 
are painful to see. Their bowing and kow- 
towing in hotels and shops, and along the Cook 
itinerary, is as though one should judge the 



THINGS JAPANESE 475 

manners of the English or the Americans by the 
demeanor of the assistants in fashionable shops 
in London or in New York. The faded man- 
ners of the floor- walkers in our great shops, 
who point prospective buyers to guns, garters, 
or gum-drops with impartial animation, are not 
the mirror which reflects our average behavior 
to one another. 

Foolish foreigners fancy that these funny 
Japanese bows, this staccato protruding of the 
salient part of the back of the person, accom- 
panied by the exaggerated lowering of the head 
to the level of the waist, many times repeated, is 
a form of prostration before their superiority. 
It is nothing of the kind. It is no more than a 
touching or a lifting of the hat, and is a per- 
functory performance that we misinterpret as 
an acknowledgment of subserviency. To tell 
the truth our manners are mostly so awkward, 
so self-conscious, and so bad, that we have come 
to look upon any manners at all as grotesque 
and slightly ridiculous. While we are smiling 
perhaps disdainfully at the ceremonious polite- 
ness of the Japanese, they, and with far more 
reason, are contemptuous of our stiffness and 
awkwardness. 

The spectacle in the theatre depicted the four 
seasons with appropriate dances for each. We 



476 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

were in the gallery facing the stage. The gal- 
leries along the sides of the theatre were oc- 
cupied by the musicians, all women, armed 
with triangles, small hand-drums and the three- 
stringed banjo, called the Samisen, This favor- 
ite instrument was only introduced into Japan 
from Manila as late as 1700. In front of these 
sat the singers : on one side the sopranos, and on 
the other the altos. One or two of the women 
sang solos, accompanied by the rest as chorus. 
One, a powerful contralto voice, was pleasant 
to the ear; though the monotonous sing-song, 
punctuated by recurring birdlike pipings, was 
totally unlike any music we ever hear. 

The dancing here, as elsewhere in Japan, is 
rather posturing and posing than dancing. The 
feet are seldom lifted from the floor, and the 
pantomime is all done with twisting and turning 
and bending of the body and waving of the arms. 
It was the clever lighting, and the harmonious 
colors of the dresses of the women, which made 
the pictures beautiful. Whether the untamed 
taste of Broadway, Leicester Square and Mont- 
martre would find such gentle pantomimic 
manoeuvres, brilliantly and beautifully colored 
though they be, served with enough condiment, 
I doubt. So much the worse for us ! 

Another evening I was the guest of a Japanese 



THINGS JAPANESE 477 

gentleman to dinner at a restaurant or tea- 
house. We have no equivalent for these places, 
and perhaps the cafes and smaller restaurants 
of the Latin countries are more nearly of the 
same service to the people. There is, of course, 
the broad difference that these places in Japan 
are served by women, and that women are in- 
variably the entertainers. We were served in a 
large, plain room, scrupulously clean, with no 
furniture, and the floor covered with matting. 
Two bronzes, a beautiful painted screen and 
a sepia drawing by a modern Japanese artist 
were there, and nothing else. We sat upon 
cushions with an ash-filled brasier between us. 
This brasier was not for warmth, but to light 
the small Japanese pipes, and to receive the 
ashes, when after two or three puffs they are 
emptied. Five young dancing girls in bright 
costumes, and some seven or eight others in 
more sombre garb, entered, went down on their 
knees before us, touching the ground with their 
foreheads. Tea is brought in, and they sit in a 
semicircle around us. The meal itself was a 
procession of small dishes, brought in one or 
two at a time and left. Whether you eat of 
them or not, or whether more are brought, none 
is taken away; so that before the meal is over 
you are surrounded by as many as twenty 



478 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

dishes or more. Some of the features of this 
particular meal were snail soup, sweets, raw 
fish, various vegetables, carrots, beans, parsnips, 
egg-plant, asparagus, young bamboo shoots, 
sweet-potatoes, stewed meat, and all accom- 
panied by frequent libations of sake out of tiny 
cups. Each guest has a bowl of fresh water in 
which he rinses his cup after drinking, fills 
it, passes it to one of the women, who drinks, 
rinses the cup, passes it back with a low bow, 
and so on and so on. Sake is served warm, and 
tastes like weak sherry. Whether it is intoxi- 
cating or not, I did not discover. I must have 
drunk dozens of these small cups of it on this 
occasion, and at other similar functions that I 
attended, but I never noticed that it had the 
smallest effect. 

During the meal some of the women thrum 
the Samisen and others dance, alone or in pairs, 
or the whole company together. During the 
interval we are supposed to be entertained con- 
versationally, and for aught I know to the con- 
trary, there may be veritable Aspasias among 
these butterfly-robed people. There is much 
bowing and smiling and paying of compliments; 
but making pretty speeches through an inter- 
preter is much like icing vintage claret. As 
they become more at their ease, they interest 



THINGS JAPANESE 479 

themselves in my watch, my cigar-ease, my 
eye-glass, and all want the bands from the 
cigars. There is no solicitation, no buffoonery, 
no coarseness. Their sisters of that profession 
elsewhere are not so well-behaved. The dishes, 
tasted, or untouched, or half-eaten, form a small 
garden around us, and finally, after more tea, 
our entertainers fall to and devour what is left. 
One of them cuts the middle out of a piece of 
bread — which had been provided for me — and 
puts butter and mustard not only on it but 
around it, and poses as being very sophisticated 
in European ways of eating. 

After sitting on one's hind legs for three 
hours, with nothing to lean against, stiffness 
joins the company. About 10.30 p. m. I ask 
to be excused. I fear that I am not much of 
a Japanese blade. They bow and smile and 
chatter as I leave, and my friend tells me that 
they suggest that I marry them all and take them 
to America; and I reply that nothing but our 
drastic emigration laws prevent that happy 
polygamous consummation of so pleasant an 
evening. 

Through the courtesy of the Minister of War, 
I was escorted to the cavalry barracks, a few 
miles out of Tokio, and spent some hours 
watching the men, horses, and the drill in the 



480 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

riding-school. The Japanese census affirms that 
there are some 1,300,000 horses in Japan. I 
was so surprised at this that I wrote to the 
Agricultural Department, asking if they would 
confirm these figures. They replied that the 
figures were as follows, sending me a detailed 
statement of the number of horses of Japanese 
breed, mixed breed and foreign breed in each 
province, and putting the total at 1,494,506. 
On looking up the figures for one province, I 
found that there was one horse there for every 
eight inhabitants, men, women, and children! 
Where they keep these horses, unless they have 
caves for them, it would tax the powers of the 
most credulous traveller to discover. It is not 
impossible that their strong desire to impress the 
foreigners with their prosperity, and their ab- 
normal weakness in mathematical matters, have 
combined to exaggerate the number of Japanese 
horses. Certainly an undeniably ludicrous out- 
come of these particular weaknesses are the 
figures for school attendance, where the state- 
ment is made that for the year 1907-8 the per- 
centage of those of school age attending school 
was 97.38! As a matter of fact, the real per- 
centage is about 72. I travelled nearly the 
whole length of Japan, and visited every large 
city, but I did not see a thousand horses in all. 



THINGS JAPANESE 481 

even including those at the cavalry barracks. 
The cHmate, too, has a curious effect upon 
foreign-bred horses imported into Japan, and 
they die of a nervous disease that thus far has 
not been remedied. 

The Japanese is not a born horseman. The 
cavalry lines were clean, the grooming seemed 
to be thoroughly done, what I saw of it; but the 
saddles were awkward affairs, and not always 
in good repair, and of bitting a horse they 
seem to know nothing. The horses I saw were 
whalers or country-bred, with a few exceptions 
that looked to be of better breeding. The work 
in the school was elementary, and even the men 
who had been at it longest were awkward horse- 
men, and not at home in the saddle. But they 
are plucky enough, there is no doubt of that. 
A dozen of them, each with a different-colored 
scarf, were sent racing across country, to pick 
up a scarf corresponding in color, and return 
with it. First they went down a fairly steep 
hill with a small water-jump at the bottom, up 
the opposite bank, there they dismounted to 
pick up the scarf, then a hurdle or two, and back 
to the starting-point at full gallop. One man 
v^as thrown going down the hill, caught his foot 
in his stirrup, was dragged some distance, but 
clung to his bridle-reins, and only lost his horse 



482 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

when the reins broke. Even then, dazed and 
stumbling, he started after his horse, and was 
only finally persuaded to limp away by those 
who ran to help him, when an officer ordered 
him to do so. I walked out to have a look at 
him, and found his face battered and bruised, 
and in a condition which would have made most 
men ask for a litter. Later, wearing masks and 
padded, they opposed one another with single- 
sticks. They were a happy, laughing crowd, 
evidently enjoying their job, of an average age 
of about twenty, and officers and men seemed 
to be much on the same level and companion- 
able. 

It was during my visit to Japan that Sub- 
marine Number 6 was lost, with all hands. 
Lieutenant Sakuma, her commander, while he 
was slowly suffocating, writes a detailed state- 
ment of how it happened, praises his crew, and 
recommends their families to the care of the state. 
"Words of apology fail me," he writes, "for 
having sunk His Majesty's Submarine Number 
6. My brave men are doing their best." On 
raising her, it was discovered that the machinery 
was at fault, and the commander not wholly to 
blame; but for sheer grit and courageous cool- 
ness, we must give Lieutenant Sakuma his place 
among the bravest of any nation. 



THINGS JAPANESE 483 

Thanks to the courtesy and kindness of the 
American Ambassador, of Captain Brinckley — 
the most valuable ally Japan possesses — Vis- 
count Kaneko, the Prime Minister, Minister of 
War, and the British and German ambassadors 
in Tokio, I saw many things, and conveniently, 
that otherwise I might not have seen at all. But 
the details of a traveller's diary are perhaps less 
interesting than the main features of the map 
he draws as he goes along. 

Everywhere, at the universities, the schools, 
hospitals, military posts, in the few houses of 
Japanese gentlemen I was privileged to see, 
even in the streets, and the country one sees from 
the car-window, one is impressed by the neat- 
ness of it all. There seems to be no rubbish in 
Japan anyw^here. Even in a great manufact- 
uring town like Osaka there is no untidiness. 
Their tastes are still simple, their houses have 
little furniture, their wardrobes are scanty as 
compared to ours, and they know nothing as yet 
of the squandering of luxury, and their women 
are all workers and not wasters. They travel 
through life with comparatively little baggage, 
and they are a poor people. The salaries of 
oflBce-holders, teachers, army and navy officers 
and professional men generally, are wofuUy small. 
Our race, however, produces many poor who are 



484 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

wasters, tempted into carelessness because pub- 
lic or private philanthropy is enthusiastic in its 
care of the careless; but the Japanese combine 
neatness and economy to an extent unknown 
even in France and Belgium. 

I had expected to find the English language 
spoken by a few well, and smatteringly by many, 
in Japan. Certain of their officials do speak 
the language well, but many do not. As for the 
English of most of the scholars, and some of the 
school-teachers, it is not English at all. The 
Japanese are dismissing as rapidly as possible all 
foreigners whom they have employed to train 
them in Western ways, from professors and 
school-teachers, to engineers, draughtsmen and 
foremen in mills and factories. This is done 
partly from motives of economy, and partly be- 
cause here, and as I believe in almost all other 
departments of life, they feel themselves to be 
capable of going it alone. Though the philolo- 
gists say that the Japanese language is not related 
to the Chinese, the Japanese have adopted a 
large number of Chinese words, and all their new 
words are from the Chinese, just as we make 
new words from the Latin and Greek. This 
accounts for the fact that the Japanese and 
Chinese can communicate by the written signs 
common to both, though they do not understand 



THINGS JAPANESE 485 

one another's speech. If the Japanese continue 
to be taught English as now they are taught, we 
shall be able to communicate by our written 
language; but the English we speak and the 
English they will speak eventually, will be so 
totally different that we shall not be able to 
understand one another's speech. In a dozen 
or more schools I visited the class-rooms where 
English or French was being taught. Without 
the text before you it would have been impos- 
sible to follow the spoken English or the spoken 
French. A Japanese youth taught English by 
a Japanese, who then teaches another Japanese, 
lands the last of the three with a pronunciation 
of English, which makes him unintelligible in 
that tongue. This seems to be carrying one's 
independence of foreign aid to an absurd pitch. 
All their schools have military training, and 
there they are in advance of us. Athletics took 
the place of enforced physical training when 
we had a small population more agricultural 
than manufacturing, out-door workers rather 
than houseworkers, and our public schools con- 
tained children of all classes. This is not the 
case now that we have a population larger than 
any other country except China, India, and 
Russia. Our athletics, splendid training though 
they be, only help a comparatively small number; 



486 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

and leave out unfortunately just those who most 
need careful physical supervision and training. 
Every school and university in our country 
ought to have compulsory physical drill of some 
sort; and we are wasting time and money on 
hygiene and hospitals, in fabulous amounts and 
to little purpose, until we begin at the beginning 
with our children and youths. 

Of travel in Japan, the most noticeable feat- 
ure to me was the positively startling disregard 
of the Japanese travellers for Western conven- 
iances. In so many other departments of life 
they are making a point of putting the best foot 
forward, and of showing off their Europeaniza- 
tion, but in the trains apparently they forget 
themselves. They take their shoes off and sit 
curled up, or sprawled out upon the seats (not 
those with Japanese foot-wear alone, when it is 
natural and cleanly enough, but those wearing 
European shoes); they hawk, spit, yawn, and 
stretch, and after luncheon several of the men 
indulged in loud belching audible the length of 
the car. Men and women go to the lavatory, 
leaving the door open ; they take children there, 
and then bring them back, and clean their least 
presentable parts in the middle of the car; and 
suckle them with no pretence of veiling the proc- 
ess. The eating of some of the men in the dining- 



THINGS JAPANESE 487 

car was like the hungry gobblhig and boltmg of 
a dog. They seemed to love meat, probably 
because they rarely get it, and ate it, some of 
them, in great quantities. One man arrived in 
the dining-car in his shirt-sleeves, and began 
spitting on the floor. The floor of the main car, 
after an hour or so, was covered with ashes, 
orange-peel, stumps of cigars and cigarettes, 
and in the midst of this chaos was heard the 
snores of one or two sleepers. I have never 
been so nearly acquainted with the habits of a 
monkey-cage, as in some of the Japanese rail- 
way carriages. I am not a fussy traveller. 
Neither my digestion nor my disposition was 
disturbed by these things. I note them as com- 
ments upon the rather maw^kish praise of Japan- 
ese manners that one hears from short-sighted 
idealists. Indeed I was so surprised at the 
manners of the Japanese when at their ease, 
that I called the attention of my Japanese friend 
to these incidents, one after another, saying to 
him: "You know^ if this were written down, the 
writer would be accused of exaggeration." 

The traveller should see Nikko, Lake Chu- 
zenji, Arashi-yama, the rapids of the brawling 
river and the mountain ; the mountain of Fuji, 
the Inland Sea, Miyajima, and of course much 
more besides; but these because he sees things 



488 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

there which are beloved of the Japanese, and 
he gets something of the Japanese point of view 
as regards scenery. Even the fields, and the 
landscape seen from car-windows, are divided 
like the patterns of a carpet. Here and there 
patches of the yellow rape seed and the lighter 
and darker shades of green, make the fields look 
as though they had been sown purposely, not 
for crops, but for color. The neatness, the sym- 
metry, the small scale of everything may prove 
disappointing at first, but he will end by appre- 
ciation. This is the unique feature of Japanese 
landscape, as of Japanese art and life. The 
mountain, Fuji, looks like a colossal ant-heap, 
and is as smooth and symmetrical as though 
it had been patted into shape by hand. At 
Nikko, the ravines, cascades, small streams, the 
temples and shrines and walks and gardens, are 
on the most diminutive scale. The mausolea 
of leyasu, the first Shogun, and of his grandson, 
and the innumerable temples, are so small that 
one is at first inclined to resent coming so far to 
see so little. But the workmanship is almost 
tiresome in its minute intricacy. The lacquer, 
the carving, gold, copper, bronze, gilt, all in pro- 
fusion, and all worked smooth and in perfection 
of detail, these and the lanterns of carved stone, 
iron and bronze, are things one expects to see in 



THINGS JAPANESE 489 

a jeweller's shop rather than exposed in the open 
air, and made to seem all the tinier by the groves 
of truly magnificent cryptomeria which sigh and 
sob above them. 

I happened upon one of the temples on the 
day of an anniversary. The Buddhist abbot 
and his priests in two row^s, squatting opposite 
one another, were reciting and reading prayers 
antiphonally. The Shinto priest, at a little 
distance from the others, was participating by 
his presence. It sounded like mumbling and 
groaning and hiccoughing to me, but possibly 
our disjointed praying in haste, would seem 
weird enough to them. 

This temple was a huge box of lacquer, ex- 
aggeratedly ornamented, and only large enough 
to contain a dozen or so of people. The temple 
of Higashi-Hongwanji, at Kioto, was built as 
lately as 1895. It cost $500,000 to build, and 
this amount was contributed in small sums, by 
the peasants and small farmers of the surround- 
ing provinces. This would indicate no decay of 
the ancient religious fealty. There are some 
195,000 Shinto shrines in Japan, and many of 
Japan's great men have temples dedicated to 
them. The tale is told of it, that the timbers 
were lifted into place by ropes made of human 
hair contributed by pious women. It was 



490 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

fresher than the others, and brilliant in black 
and gold, but no more ambitious in architecture, 
and less careful, it seemed to me, in delicacy of 
workmanship. At Kioto, too, is one of the huge 
heads of Buddha, some sixty feet high, a gro- 
tesque affair; although the Daibutsu, or great 
Buddha of bronze at Kamakura, not far from 
Yokohama, is an imposing monument. Like the 
pyramids and the Sphinx, it imposes upon our 
restlessness by its unmeaning stability. Just to 
last for centuries, asking nothing, answering 
nothing, explaining nothing, doing nothing, 
brings us up sharp, and face to face, with the 
consciousness of how fugitive we are, and how 
quickly the traces of the wisest and strongest of 
us are obliterated. What an offence such a 
monument must be to a citizen of Chicago or 
Winnipeg! 

At the Art Museum at Kioto is a portrait of 
a priest named Fuku Souzo, said to have been 
painted by the Chinese artist Choshikyo in the 
twelfth century. If it is genuine and has not 
been touched up by a later hand, it is one of the 
marvels of portraiture of that age, and bears 
comparison easily with any portraiture work of 
the same time in Europe. Japanese painters, 
whether of screens or of kakemonos, had the 
best to copy from in the work of the Chinese 



THINGS JAPANESE 491 

artists of the days when they were pupils of the 
Chinese. At a well-assorted and well-arranged 
special exhibition at the British Museum last 
year, the history and development of Japanese 
art was shown in a series of examples of Chi- 
nese and Japanese paintings and drawings. 
The Japanese have not improved upon their 
teachers. 

These temples and the grounds around them, 
whether the Buddhist temple of Asakusa Hwan- 
non, near Tokio, or at Nara, Kioto, Nikko, or 
elsewhere, are picnic and pilgrimage resorts. In 
the rooms of some of them you may smoke and 
have tea; at others you may buy for a small 
sum a slip of paper with your fortune told on it; 
you may rub a wooden image to w^ard off disease ; 
you may throw money or darts of paper at a 
wire screen in front of an image; if it goes 
through your prayer is favorably answered; 
there are tea-houses, moving-picture exhibitions, 
theatres, side-shows of all sorts; in a word, re- 
ligion is complacent, the gods may be wooed by 
worldly methods, the mysteries remain mysteries, 
but the powers are accommodating; the thou- 
sands of small w^ooden slabs nailed up with the 
names of donors on them, which one sees in all 
these places, denote that there is a cheerful ex- 
pectation of rewards in return for gifts. 



492 THE \^T^ST IN THE EAST 

It is all as open and gay and bright and child- 
ish as a sunny day in the nursery, when it is 
decided to play at church. One may see in 
Spain bright posters announcing the next bull- 
fight posted on the walls of the churches; Trust 
magnates build churches and support parsons 
in America; the House of Commons, to a man, 
subscribes to a benefit for a prize-fight; murder- 
ers in Italy present candles to favorite saints to 
avoid detection, and poisoners become popes, 
and have nephews and nieces. One must go 
slow, and know many lands and many peoples, 
and the manners and morals of them, before one 
prances forth on one's provincial prejudices, to 
set the world to rights. 

This was borne in upon me when I attended 
a Japanese theatre, with my intelligent Japanese 
friend. A Japanese theatrical performance is 
practically an all-day affair. You may go at 
noon and stay till nine o'clock at night. An 
agent will arrange for your seats, for tiffin, tea, 
dinner, cigarettes, sweets, and a hot bath, if you 
want it, at a neighboring tea-house. During the 
intervals you may walk about in the surrounding 
shops. Families and parties come and camp 
out comfortably for the day. I am at a loss to 
know why this is supremely ridiculous, except 
for the one barbaric reason that it is different. 



THINGS JAPANESE 493 

Did not the Athenians sit from six in the morn- 
ing, for five to six hours at a stretch, and again 
for hours in the afternoon to see a tragedy of 
iEschylus performed ? Who has not sat through 
plays and operas, and monotonously vulgar 
vaudeville performances at home, where a meal, 
and a nap, or a bath, would have been consoling, 
comforting, and far more profitable to body and 
mind alike. 

Three American girls and two American 
youths sat not far from me. They pointed and 
made remarks about their neighbors ; one of the 
youths actually had a foot sprawling over the 
railing of the box. The girls talked that cockney 
jargon of silly slang, which is the mental accom- 
plishment which goes with gum-chewing and 
that intrepid wardrobe, which is low and per- 
forated at the neck and shoulders, and tight to 
bursting over the hips. The slender, pale-faced, 
cigarette-inhaling youths wore clothes with 
padded shoulders; in at the waist, out over the 
hips, and in again at the ankles, which are only 
produced, and only worn, by those who regard 
linings of canvas and cotton-batting as an alto- 
gether elusive way of concealing lack of breeding, 
exercise, and proper feeding. 

How the Japanese must misinterpret us when 
they see such a group as this! They do not 



494 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

know that nowadays wealth and leisure to 
travel are often at the disposal of the unedu- 
cated, ill-mannered, ignorant, and self-assertive 
of our race. 

They do know the difference, however. A 
distinguished Japanese member of the House of 
Peers was commenting to me upon the mistake 
so many of our men make, whether in diplomacy 
or in commerce, in attempting to over-reach 
rivals, hustling about for trade, striving at any 
cost to get something tangible for their country. 
"These are not the men who gain the valuable 
and lasting things for your country," he said. 
''They seem to, but it is not so. Your scholars 
and gentlemen, your modest men, are those who 
impress us most and win our most valuable 
favors." Then he said : "I have always thought 
it curious that of the three men I have known in 
my career as statesman, at home and abroad, 
whom I considered good, all were Americans." 
One of these, I may say, was a certain Ameri- 
can ambassador, who has entirely neglected to 
advertise himself. 

We have got it into our heads that diplomacy 
nowadays demands a sort of political travelling 
salesman. Nothing could be more fatal. Such 
men are irritants rather than friend-makers ; and 
not only in the East, but everywhere else, they 



THINGS JAPANESE 495 

are looked upon either as disguised drummers 
for trade, or as the best an ignorant country can 
send. 

It is true, perhaps, that while the civilizations 
of the East are ever analyzing fate, we of the 
West are ever attempting to express and to 
stamp our will ; but all the more reason for doing 
this as quietly and as unobtrusively as possible. 
I doubt if diplomacy ever gets anything of real 
and lasting value by superior and cunning bar- 
gaining. 

If the foreign and domestic affairs of Japan 
were regulated by such men as the gentleman I 
have just quoted, and by men of the type of 
Prince Ito and others, there would be little to 
criticise. Even the taking of Korea is only in 
line with our own policy toward Cuba, or Eng- 
land's toward Burma. 

Korea is a military and commercial necessity 
to Japan, as any one may see who travels from 
Tokio to Shimonosek'i, and there takes steamer 
across to Fusan, the southern port of Korea; 
travels the length of Korea, from Fusan to the 
Yalu River, and then through southern Man- 
churia to Mukden, and then on to Kharbin. 

Letters from Tokio paved my way for this 
journey. I was officially chaperoned by the 
Japanese from the time I left Fusan, escorted 



496 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

to the railway station by the Japanese consul, till 
I took the train at Kharbin for Moscow. 

Everything that care and courtesy can do to 
make a journey instructive and comfortable 
was done. The trip across the water from 
Shimonoseki to Fusan was on a fine steamer, 
and is made in ten hours at slow speed, from 
ten o'clock at night till eight the next morning. 
From Fusan on a good broad-gauge railroad to 
Seoul takes another ten hours, and from Seoul 
to the Yalu River is a fourteen hours' journey. 
The bridge across the Yalu River is half built, 
and once the broad-gauge railway line from 
Antung-Shien, on the Manchuria side of the 
Yalu River, to Mukden is completed, the Japa- 
nese will control the whole trade of Manchu- 
ria. Treaties and tariffs and sentimental open- 
do orism will avail nothing. There will be a 
wide, well-kept open door to be sure, but with 
Japanese in uniform as custom's oflficials, police- 
men, and soldiers on both sides of it. Osaka 
will then furnish southern China with piece 
goods, and the middle China ore fields will be 
tapped for the benefit of Japanese factories. 
Japanese goods can be shipped in bulk from as 
far as Tokio, to Mukden, to Kharbin, to Tien- 
tsin, to Peking, and later, when the railway is 
finished, not only to Shanghai, but to Canton. 



THINGS JAPANESE m 

Two more years, and you may go in a Pullman 
car from Paris to Tokio; and as for freight, 
steam ferries from Fusan to Shimonoseki will 
enable a shipper to send goods in sealed cars 
from^ Paris, Beriin, Amsterdam, Vienna to 
Tokio; and in the same manner from Tokio to 
those capitals, if he wishes. 

Korea may be of small value commercially; 
but with Japanese industry and control, and 
with modern agricultural machinery, Manchuria 
will become another Canada, and feed all Japan 
and more besides. 

For many years to come, if these be the lines 
of development, if these be the outlets for Japa- 
nese energy and emigration, we in America have 
nothing to fear either from coolie emigration nor 
from military aggression. Only those who do 
not know the situation; who have not seen the 
feverish activity of bridge and railway build- 
ing; the pushing of Japanese settlers into and 
through Korea and up into Manchuria; the 
government refusal of passports to Japanese 
wishing to go West; and the coaxing of Japan- 
ese families and laborers into Manchuria, talk 
of war as imminent. 

During the year ending June 30, 1908, 9,544 
Japanese were admitted to the United States 
(excluding Hawaii) ; while during the year end- 



498 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

ing June 30, 1909, only 2,432 were admittedo 
These figures include all Japanese, whether 
laborers or not. For the year endmg June 30, 
1910, only 705 laborers were admitted to the 
United States from Japan, all of whom were re- 
turning laborers or parents, wives or children of 
domiciled laborers. The immigration of Japa- 
nese into Hawaii, from the year 1908 to the year 
1909, decreased 83 per cent, and during the years 
1909 to 1910 more Japanese left Hawaii than ar- 
rived there. These figures show the trend of 
events in Japan, and point straight to the real 
interests, and the important task, which is in 
Manchuria. Not even the most infatuated ad- 
mirer of Japan, not even the most sensitive ob- 
server of the signs of war, can believe that Japan 
at this time can govern, settle and develop 
Formosa, Korea and Manchuria, and occupy 
the Philippines and our Western coast at the 
same time. Russia has been appeased and 
is quiescent, and China is still comatose for 
the moment, but for years to come Japan will 
have all she can do to consolidate her power 
there. 

Japan is heavily in debt, her resources are 
small, and the tasks she has undertaken are 
diflScult, and until they are finished there will be 
no returns, no dividends. She has use for all 



THINGS JAPANESE 499 

the money and all the men she can lay hands 
on ; and for the present, at least, she has no use 
for the Philippine Islands or for Alaska. Her 
greatest difficulty now is her lack of first-class 
trained men to do her work for her. She has 
gone much too fast, not only in accepting new 
burdens, but in dismissing her European ad- 
visers and instructors, whether from conceit or 
economy. Even the Chinese are dismissing 
Japanese engineers and builders, and turning 
again to Europeans, finding them in the long 
run cheaper. 

The taking over and control of Korea was 
not a difficult task. Korea has a population of 
about 10,000,000 of the laziest, the most good- 
for-nothing Orientals in the world. For cen- 
turies they have submitted to robbery, extortion, 
and bullying from depraved rulers. As lately 
as 1906 the Korean Emperor proposed a dis- 
bursement of $600,000 for the suitable celebra- 
tion of his wedding, this sum representing about 
one-seventh of the total revenues of the country 
for one year! Nearly one-half the population 
to-day is without regular occupation. Even as 
lately as 1895 it was indeed the ''Hermit King- 
dom," and an unknown land. The king and 
an enormous court following treated the Kore- 
ans like children, taxed them, beat them, and 



500 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

robbed them. Shiftlessness, indifference, and 
moral recklessness were the result. 

China, Russia, and Japan pulled the Korean 
Emperor this way and that, until the strongest 
and most persistent won, and now Korea is in 
the hands of Japan. The export and import 
trade of Korea in 1908 amounted to yen 55,138,- 
833; both exports and imports have practically 
doubled since 1904. Since the Japanese took 
control, the rural house tax, for example, has 
increased from 454,829 houses and yen 136,448 
to 1,946,673 houses and yen 583,994. The 
stamp receipts in 1905 were yen 1,860; in 1908 
they were yen 120,972. Korea is now gar- 
risoned by Japanese soldiers; there is a Japa- 
nese police force, with a few Koreans in 
subordinate places; the whole administration 
system is being reorganized; there are Japanese 
courts and judges; the revenues from mines 
and forests and taxes, formerly monopolized 
and wasted by the imperial household, are prop- 
erly used; the legal age of marriage has been 
raised to seventeen for men, fifteen for w^omen; 
and a sum of $10,000,000 granted to Korea for 
needed reforms. Industrial schools, hospitals, 
girls' and boys' high schools, normal schools, 
many of which I visited, have been set going and 
are well managed by the Japanese. At Seoul, 



THINGS JAPANESE 501 

the capital, I was taken through the law courts, 
the prison, police stations, and I spent many 
hours in class-rooms, saw the driUing of the 
children in calisthenics, and all the machinery 
of government, from a chat with Mr. Watanake, 
"President de la cour supreme," down to the 
thief brought in to the police station the night 
before. All this means a tremendous, drastic, 
and disagreeable change for the Koreans. 

This miserable work-house civilization has 
been turned out and made to begin earning a 
living; the beggar and the tramp have been put 
to work at the wood-pile. This population in 
their baggy, formless white clothing, and their 
horse-hair stove-pipe hats, living on highly sea- 
soned cabbage, beans and rice; and wedded, 
men, women and children, to their tobacco-pipes 
as are no other people in the world, are being 
prodded and pushed by their energetic conquer- 
ors into some sort of regularity of life and work. 
They hate it all as a tramp hates a tread-mill. 
Prince Ito, the Japanese Lincoln, was assassi- 
nated by one of them; and twenty-one of them 
were awaiting trial, when I was there, for an 
attempt on the life of the Prime Minister, in 
November, 1909. 

Korea has been a paradise for the missionary. 
Nowhere else in the East has he made so many 



502 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

converts. It is not diflScult to understand why. 
These pliable, indifferent people, too lazy to de- 
fend themselves from the extortion and tyranny 
of their ruler and his horde of sycophant cour- 
tiers, turned to the missionaries; and where the 
robbery and cruelty were too flagrant they stood 
up for and helped their converts. The Koreans 
leaned back upon the missionaries, as they 
would have leaned back upon anybody who 
would support the burden of their cowardice 
and laziness. 

The Koreans, like the Chinese, respect the 
student, the man of the book; and the man of 
the book everywhere finds it easy to get a hear- 
ing. The missionaries rehabilitated the simple 
alphabetical language, which the Koreans had 
spurned as the ** Dirty Language." After four 
hundred years of disuse, this, the simplest of all 
the Eastern languages, was revived, and the 
Bible printed in it, and the Koreans had the 
New Testament to read as their first book. Un- 
like the Japanese and the Chinese, the Koreans 
were without a religion of form or ceremony, and 
Christianity supplied that need. They had been 
Confucians if anything, and Confucianism is a 
mere code of morals, and with no more cere- 
monial than the Ten Commandments. The mis- 
sionaries appealed to the women particularly. 



THINGS JAPANESE 503 

They had been kept apart and secluded, much 
as are the women of India. Their religion had 
been a form of Fetichism, the placating of, or 
the fighting against, innumerable evil spirits. 
Women were allowed to go to church by their 
husbands, and grew to like the opportunities 
for meeting and gossip. The word ''gossip" it- 
self means a sponsor at baptism. The women 
on these occasions, by their chatter and spread- 
ing of news, gave the word "gossip" the mean- 
ing it now holds for us. Why should not Ko- 
rean women like gossip as well as the Germans, 
who gave the word its present significance ? I 
give these reasons to account for the success of 
the missionaries in Korea, because it is entirely 
untrue that the philosophy or the morality of 
Christianity are alone responsible for the situa- 
tion. On the contrary, I look upon it as any- 
thing but a compliment to Christianity that the 
most contemptible and supine race in the East 
should be, of all others, and pre-eminently, the 
race most attracted to Christianity. Out of 
regard to the good name of our Western creed, 
it should be explained that the tax-dodger, the 
coward, the dependent, the shiftless, the bullied 
found in the missionaries protection and care; 
and it is not surprising that they followed and 
fawned upon them, and became what the Chinese 



504 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

call '"rice-Christians." Be it said, too, that the 
missionaries deserve every credit for what they 
have done. It is no slur upon them that the 
morally blind, halt and lame have found com- 
fort and solace and protection in them. It is 
not, however, a matter for boasting. 

In Mr. Gale's church I attended a service 
where seven or eight hundred Koreans were 
present, which was as apparently sincere, rever- 
ent, and enthusiastic as any church service I 
have ever attended anywhere. Alas, as is always 
the case with great missionaries like Xavier, or 
Bishop Brooks, of Massachusetts, or Bishop 
Hall, of Vermont, and other great spiritual 
leaders, they credit their followers with their 
own devotion. Gale would have a following 
anywhere, from the Bowery, in New York, to a 
bazaar in Baroda. He is a man, that's all ; and 
Korean enthusiasm and piety are merely his 
character. 

Now that the Japanese have taken over not 
only Korea, and its taxes and administration, 
but the Koreans and their affairs as well; now 
that the taxation is fair to all alike, and justice 
meted out to all alike; now that the Koreans are 
finding that the missionaries cannot defend them 
from the Japanese, as they defended them from 
the extortions of their former rulers, there is a 



THINGS JAPANESE 505 

marked lessening of enthusiasm for Christianity. 
The murderer of Prince Ito was a Christian 
convert, and eighteeen out of the twenty-one 
who made the attempt on the life of the Prime 
Minister were also Christian converts. 

It is a difficult situation for the missionaries, 
for any effort by word or deed to improve the 
Korean may be twisted into meaning encourage- 
ment of his hatred of the Japanese. It is hard 
indeed, if one may not preach to men to be men, 
and independent men, without being suspected 
of inciting one's hearers to sedition. On the 
other hand, the Japanese might well take excep- 
tion to an American missionary, who publishes 
an account of how Prince Min, when he heard 
that the Japanese were in control, committed 
suicide, and concludes: "'Written large around 
his name Korea will ever read the sentence, 
'Sweet and seemly is it to die for one's father- 
land.'" No American missionary should be 
permitted to publish such incendiary sentimen- 
tality. Do Christians believe in suicide! Do 
Christians believe in a prince who has shuffled 
and twisted and shirked and brought his troubles 
on himself by lazy debauchery, and then com- 
mits suicide! No state department in any 
country in Europe, or in America, can defend 
such glorification of a mean-spirited prince, with 



506 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

its evident aim to show sympathy to the con- 
quered and to incite to wrong-doing against the 
conqueror. What would we do in Cuba, or in 
the Philippines, to such an one ? I am not de- 
fending the Japanese, but they are quite within 
bounds if they suppress such talk and writing, 
and that with a heavy hand ; and no honest 
American would have a word to say agamst it. 

The Japanese, and it is one of his best traits, 
holds self-control in the highest esteem. A 
young Japanese noble writes in his diary: 
*'Dost thou feel the soil of thy soul stirred with 
tender thoughts ? It is time for seeds to sprout. 
Disturb it not with speech; but let it work alone 
in quietness and secrecy." Another writes: 
"To give in so many articulate words one's 
inmost thoughts and feelings, notably the re- 
ligious, is taken among us as an unmistakable 
sign that they are neither very profound nor 
very sincere. Only a pomegranate is he who 
when he gapes his mouth displays the contents 
of his heart." The blatant and voluble Christian 
will do well to take such good counsel to heart. 

I admit that Japanese domination is hard 
to bear. The soldiers, police, and lower class 
Japanese generally, strut and swagger, and as 
I have written already, are much too rough in 
their often rude and unconciliatory methods. 



THINGS JAPANESE 507 

Not a single day passed while I was in Korea 
and Manchuria that I did not see Koreans 
and Manchus roughly handled. On the other 
hand, from the director-general, chief-justice, 
chief of police, commissioner of education, I 
heard nothing but talk and plans for the better 
government of Korea. 

At Seoul, the director-general invited me to 
a dinner of some twenty prominent officials. 
My shoes were removed at the door of the res- 
taurant, and in my stocking feet I made my 
bow to my host and his assembled guests. It 
was a test of one's personal dignity and urbanity ! 
We sat on cushions on the floor. There was 
nothing in the room but a single bush of 
azaleas, which was placed at my right elbow. 
We were served, and entertained with singing 
and dancing and conversation, by Japanese and 
Korean women. The long scroll with the names 
of the dishes in Japanese and in English, which 
is before me as I write, measures just one inch 
short of five feet, and includes twenty-six dif- 
ferent dishes. I may not give the entire list. 
Some of the dishes were "snipe and young 
ginger," "fish and sea-weed," "green vegetables 
and Japanese soy," "eggs (spawn) of the tai 
fish and edible ferns," "lobsters with sweetened 
chestnuts," "red bean soup," "rice cake," 



508 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

'' cuttle-fish," " honey," "preserved fruits." The 
snipe and ginger, the red bean soup, various 
dishes of eggs, the edible ferns, and the preserved 
fruits were excellent; and what with English, 
French, and a little German, for some of my 
fellow-guests spoke one language, some another, 
the conversational ball was kept rolling. The 
men were all intelligent, all interested in their 
work, and all studiously polite to the only 
stranger present. Not even the large banquet 
in Tokio, where I met the Prime-Minister and 
the famous General Kuroki, of Yalu River fame, 
and many other celebrities, was more interesting. 
It seemed to be the wish of the Japanese offi- 
cials that I should see everything, and although 
the intention to annex Korea was denied, while 
even then the preparations were under way, I 
believe it is not the habit of diplomats and offi- 
cials anywhere to play the pomegranate, and 
open the mouth so freely that one may see the 
contents of their hearts. 

The comfortable route for those going from 
Japan to Moscow, via the Trans-Siberian rail- 
way, is to cross the Sea of Japan from Tsuruga 
to Vladivostock, where the train starts; or one 
may go to Dalny (Port Arthur) and take a train 
there straight to Kharbin and join the train 
there; or one may go all the way by train from 



THINGS JAPANESE 509 

Peking to Kharbin. If you wish to see the 
heart of the Eastern question of to-day, however, 
you will cross the Yalu River on the northern 
border of Korea, and crawl along to Mukden, 
on what remains of General Kuroki's crazy little 
military railway, two feet six inches gauge, and 
take the train there to Kharbin. 

Leaving Seoul at nine in the morning, I ar- 
rived at New Wiju at a little after eleven at 
night. In order to be sure of the train next 
morning, a Chinese junk was hired to take us 
across the Yalu River, and the night was spent 
in a Chinese inn at Antung-Shien. The next 
morning at half-past seven we bundled into a 
small box-car ten feet long, five feet wide, and 
seven feet high, and with a band of all sorts, 
including Chinese, Manchus, Japanese, drawn 
by a diminutive locomotive engine built, I 
noticed, by the Baldwin Locomotive Company, 
we started. 

I still look back upon that journey with sur- 
prise and gratitude. The railway is of the 
portable kind that can be laid quickly, and 
there is no pretence of permanency; on the con- 
trary, there w^ere ominous and frequent indica- 
tions of a tendency to disappear entirely. The 
embankments are hastily thrown up, the bridges 
are of logs loosely spiked together, and when 



510 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

one gets a glimpse of the line from the car- 
window, it looks like a ribbon carelessly thrown 
across valleys, beside streams, and around moun- 
tains. Often it seemed that we should roll 
backward down a mountain, or that a shaky 
bridge would give a last shake and let us through 
into a torrent below; but the doughty little loco- 
motive puffed, and wheezed, and grunted, and 
pulled us along somehow. I saw forests that 
mean a fortune, miles and miles of arable lands 
that mean food, and I was told of mines of cop- 
per and coal. We hardly travelled as fast as a 
well-horsed road coach; we stopped wherever 
there was a passenger; we picked up and de- 
posited all sorts of freight; the seats were of 
wood with no cushions; and when, as happened 
from time to time, there were nine Japanese or 
Chinese packed in the small carriage with me, 
the situation was uncomfortable. 

On such a crazy little line there is no travel at 
night, and at sunset we halt at Sokakua and 
spend the night in another Manchurian inn. 
All through China and Japan, and wherever 
Japanese influence extends, you can get a hot 
bath, and at these resting-places I tumbled into 
a hot bath and out, and into bed ; and one is too 
tired to know whether one is uncomfortable or 
not. 



THINGS JAPANESE 511 

Thirty miles from Mukden we reach Sakyoshi, 
where the broad-gauge road has arrived on its 
way to the Yalu River. To change into a car 
of average size, and to move along at average 
speed, and to have a seat all to oneself, seemed 
the height of luxurious travel. It is like the 
change into a smoothly driven carriage, on a 
good road, from a jaunting-car in Tipperary, in 
rainy weather, with a broken-down thorough- 
bred between the shafts, and a casual Irishman 
handling the reins. 

Even the dirty hotel in Mukden, to which we 
are driven by a yelling Manchu, over roads of 
mud and negligently placed boulders, seemed a 
haven of rest after that railway journey, which I 
may safely say is the worst railway journey in 
the world. Mukden is an old Tartar town, 
surrounded by a high wall, with wide gateways 
and watch-towers. The population consists of 
some 250,000, including 5,000 Japanese, and 
about 150 Europeans. The Manchus, both 
men and women, are stalwart-looking people; 
and the women, with their coarsely dyed cheeks, 
and the mirrors glittering in their carefully and 
intricately dressed hair, are as independent, as 
they walk the streets, as the men. Mukden was 
the capital of the Manchu dynasty until the Man- 
chus marched west and conquered Peking. Even 



512 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

now the palace is kept open, and in some sort 
of repair, and there is a complete equipment of 
officials. The present administration is in the 
hands of a governor-general, who is also the 
military governor. Eight months after my visit 
the plague played havoc in Mukden and the 
surrounding country. It is not to be wondered 
at. Within these walls live a quarter of a million 
people, disdaining all sanitary precautions, the 
streets deep in mud or dust, the shops and 
houses crowded together so that one might walk 
from roof to roof, and the contents of the shops, 
and of the open booths which line the streets, 
exposed to the flying dust. They are a noisy 
lot too, and from dawn till night the raucous 
and piercing cries of the peddlers through the 
streets, the rumbling of the heavy Pekinese 
carts, the chatter of the crowds, make the place 
a very bedlam. 

Escorted by the Japanese military attache, I 
was shown the palace buildings and the tombs 
of the founders of the Manchu dynasty. The 
palace buildings are empty, and the grounds neg- 
lected, though there is a small army of Manchu 
soldiers, police, and servants about. The beau- 
tifully lacquered walls and floors, the roofs of 
many-colored tiles; and many treasures, such as 
jewelled weapons and richly embroidered gar- 



THINGS JAPANESE 518 

ments, red lacquer ware, carved ivory, jade and 
bronze, are still to be seen. I was told by a 
friend, recently from Peking, that the buildings 
here were as elaborate as those in Peking. To 
us, with our test of comfort, palaces whether in 
Japan, China, or Korea look barren, cold and 
stiff, however clean and polished and delicately 
ornamented they may be. 

Much more elaborate are the tombs of these 
gentry than were their homes. A broad avenue 
paved with large blocks of stone, and lined on 
each side with huge lions, horses, elephants, and 
griffins in stone, leads to the tombs, with their 
pagoda-roofs, the edges tilted up, as though 
architecture had taken to the foppery of brushing 
up the ends of its mustaches. In one of them 
was a stone tortoise of enormous size, on which 
was a tablet with the virtues and accomplish- 
ments of the deceased graven thereon. 

The next day I attended a banquet given in 
honor of the anniversary of the Japanese Red 
Cross Society. We assembled in an anteroom, 
Japanese officers and officials, the Manchu 
governor of the province, mandarins in their 
short coats with long sleeves, and their bell- 
shaped helmets with different-colored horse-hair 
plumes, and there we were served with tea and 
cigarettes, and made profound bows to one 



514 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

another. Later we marched out in procession 
to the music of a really first-rate Chinese brass 
band, through a crowd of five or six hundred 
guests. On a raised platform, with some ten 
Chinese and Japanese officials, I sat, looking, 
I trust, as solemn as they. There followed 
speeches, the Manchu governor lifting his robes 
and taking his manuscript out of his right boot- 
leg when he was called upon; and there was 
much applauding and much shouting of Ban- 
zais. After this we sat down at long tables to a 
luncheon, supplied with dozens of dishes, some 
of them very elaborate, and accompanied with 
generous amounts of champagne. We had been 
at it for three hours when the real performance 
began, with dancing and sword-play and sing- 
ing on a stage in front of us. It was evident that 
the governor was bored by these rather tepid 
amusements, and even I was but mildly inter- 
ested. He called an officer to his side, who 
thereupon whispered a word in the ear of the 
Japanese presiding officer, and to my horror, 
but to my intense relief, he arose in the middle 
of the performance, and followed by his officers 
and attendants, stalked out of the grounds, got 
into his carriage, and left. With admiration for 
his coolness and courage, I turned my back upon 
the Japanese performer on the stage who was 



THINGS JAPANESE 515 

just then standing upon one leg, holding fans in 
her teeth, her hair, her hands, and between her 
toes, and followed the yellow gentleman out. It 
was all done quietly, with dignity and ease; and 
the Japanese bowing and scraping as he left, 
made him appear all the more the gentleman of 
the occasion. 

That night, on a sleeping-car built by the 
Pullman Company, drawn by a locomotive built 
by the American Locomotive Company, I left 
Mukden for Kharbin. In the dining-car the 
next morning I had a capital breakfast. At 
Chang-Chung, where we arrived at 6 a. m., the 
Japanese control of the railway line ends and 
the Russian control begins. At eleven o'clock 
the Russian train with Russian soldiers, guards, 
and conductors rolled into the station. The 
Russians looked enormous, as they stepped off 
the train, beside the Japanese officials from the 
other train. One of them carried a sword as 
long as the Japanese station-master. After these 
many months I was in the hands of white 
men again. It is hard to explain or describe 
the positive delight one experiences. I can only 
say I was tempted to shake hands with them all. 
At half-past eight that night we arrived at Khar- 
bin. They call Kharbin the Paris of the East! 
It only shows how completely the point of view 



516 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

dictates opinions. The streets are badly paved, 
the mud thick and mucilaginous; the hotel, 
except for the redeeming feature of the fresh 
caviare, dirty and uncomfortable; but it is a 
white man's town! 

The houses and shops are solidly built of 
stone and brick, the permanent buildings are 
for the living, not exclusively for the dead; the 
horses gallop and trot; the men gesticulate, 
and their display of energy and go in fifteen 
minutes would be exercise enough for an Indian, 
a Korean, or a Japanese for a month. They 
drink vodka and eat meat, and the physical ex- 
travagance, after the listless physical economy 
to which I was becoming accustomed, is like a 
breath of fresh air. There are dancing and 
singing and clinking of glasses and bursts of 
laughter in the cafe chantant in the hotel 
restaurant in the evening; men shake hands 
heartily and slap one another across the shoul- 
ders; applaud loudly the rather poor perform- 
ances on the stage, but they are alive and like it ! 
I am alive too, and I like it. I like the ups and 
downs of it; the strain and stress of it; the dis- 
appointments and the surprises; the laughter, 
and the love, and the hearty friendships; and 
the enmities and the prejudices, and the blows 
given and received; the triumphs and disasters; 



THINGS JAPANESE 517 

the frank pushing and battling to get the most; 
out of life; the detestation of death and decay. 
I do not want the legions to thunder past while 
I plunge in thought again. I want to thunder 
past with the legions. Let the milksop tell you 
that there should be no racial prejudices, no 
patriotism, no exclusive love of your own, no 
radical and profound belief that the world be- 
longs to those who take it, and that you are one 
of the takers; that there is no East, no West; 
but the moment you step across the line between 
the East and the West, you shake yourself, rub 
your eyes, and find yourself the West's own 
child again. 

It was ten days across Siberia from Kharbin 
to Moscow, and I suppose the journey is slow 
and tedious. Indeed that question has been 
put to me more often than any other perhaps; 
"How was the trans-Siberian journey.?" I 
dare not answer. To me it was comfortable 
and exciting, for I was on my way home! 



CONCLUSION 

A YEAR in the Far East has not converted 
me to any behef in my own omniscience. 
These sketches of conditions there, are 
intended to furnish material to my countrymen 
for drawing their own conclusions, as I have 
drawn mine. 

First of all we must rid ourselves of the as- 
sumption that we are called upon to impose our 
reKgious and moral codes upon the East, if need 
be by an armed crusade; and to follow this by 
dictating to the East the commercial and mili- 
tary lines along which they shall be permitted to 
develop. The days of the missionary-cwm-gun- 
boat policy have gone by. They have gone by, 
not because the Western lust for the land and 
trade of the East has lessened, but because the 
East has grown strong enough to put a stop to it. 
We were not converted to charity toward the 
East by obedience to the tenets of our religion, 
but by Kuroki*s guns at the Yalu River. Let us 
be frank and admit it. The East scents some- 
thing more than mere religious fervor in our solic- 
itude for their moral and religious welfare, and 

518 



CONCLUSION 519 

notes that more leagues of territory have been 
taken from her than leagues of progress have 
been made in converting her. The assumption 
of moral superiority has been accompanied by a 
very commercial demand for payment, not in the 
things of the spirit, but in the things of the flesh. 
"Doth the wild ass bray, when he hath grass ?" 
The only book every Westerner knows is an 
Eastern book. Eastern from cover to cover. 
Eastern in its modes of thought. Eastern in its 
images, Eastern in its belief in autocracy. East- 
ern in its belief in the subordination of women, 
Eastern in its occasional pictures of gross im- 
morality. Eastern in its lazy gentleness, Eastern 
in its unconscious cruelty. The West accepts the 
Bible as its best literature. Even in the matter 
of material possessions, the East is still our 
teacher, and those Orientals, the Jews, are our 
most powerful bankers. The enlightened among 
the Orientals, therefore, and though they be few 
in numbers, they rule, claim that they have 
given us enough to prove that along spiritual 
lines they are not in our debt; and further, that 
their consent should be asked before we force 
them to accept the mechanical and material 
mould we call progress. We have assumed 
superiority because we could enforce it; our 
superiority has not won its way by conversion 



520 THE ^VEST IN THE EAST 

along peaceful lines. Japan was driven to mar- 
tialism to defend herself from China, then from 
Russia, and then from the demands of all Eu- 
rope and America for extra-territoriality for their 
citizens. 

If we take the high moral ground, therefore, 
that we must force our code upon them by foul 
means or fair, they ask why we do not first con- 
vert the agnostics of France and Italy, the so- 
cialists of Germany, and the avowed unbelievers 
in those countries and in America and the British 
Empire. Further they make reply, that a cen- 
tury of effort along those lines has accomplished 
practically nothing. India, China and Japan 
are no more at heart Christian to-day than an 
hundred years ago ; and they claim that the first 
light of equality and fair-play came to them 
from the flashing sword of Japan. The sword, 
not the cross, delivered them. 

They recall that privileges were extended to 
the missionaries in China by a contemptible ad- 
dition, surreptitiously made, to a French ti'eaty, 
and signed by the Chinese before it was discov- 
ered. They recognize that we would not per- 
mit a Confucian teacher to rail against religion; 
a Shinto priest to spread his doctrine of ''Fol- 
low your natural impulses and obey the Mikado's 
decrees"; a Hindu prophet of Sivaji to foment 



CONCLUSION 521 

discord among us in the West; and we shall find 
as time goes on, and as extra-territorial privileges 
lessen, as they have ceased entirely in Japan, that 
we shall be more and more held to account for 
the doings and preachments of our missionaries. 
I mean this not in the least as derogatory to 
the work of these men and women, for I know 
of nothing more courageous, patient and self- 
sacrificing than the work some of them are doing. 
I mean merely that the East is growing strong 
enough to resent dictation upon this or any other 
subject. Now that they are strong enough to 
make their resentment dangerous, we can no 
longer force ourselves upon them. In our at- 
titude toward the East we must take up new 
ground; as the strategists say, take other posi- 
tions. Our authority and superiority are no 
longer to be taken for granted. 

It is a pretty problem, this, of our suddenly 
altered relations with the East. The chief diffi- 
culty lies in the fact that our great democracies 
of the West must necessarily be governed by the 
uneducated, the superficial, and the untravelled. 
Nothing is haughtier than savage ignorance, 
nothing more opinionated than racial prejudice, 
nothing more difficult to deal with than that 
narrow uprightness which expresses itself in 
downrightness. In our domestic affairs these 



522 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

things rub against one another, and the angles 
of difficulty are smoothed out, and in spite of 
many hitches and some disasters, the people 
work out their salvation without thought of war, 
at any rate. 

But as a nation dealing with another nation, 
the way to the solution of such problems is more 
delicate and more difficult. We are apt to fall 
into the error of choosing as our representatives 
to other countries, either men who demand office 
for services to a party, or men whom we think 
will hustle the East for trade privileges. One 
is as bad and as provocative to misunderstand- 
ing as the other. The trade ends should be 
in the hands of professional traders, but the 
diplomatic representation ought to be in the 
hands of the cultivated and of the intellectually 
enfranchised; those who believe, with Goethe, 
that "to know the world and not to despise it is 
the end and aim of culture." It is hard to make 
the business West understand that this is the 
type of man most respected, better understood 
and of more value to us, than any other in the 
East, where they are suffering, not as the un- 
travelled believe, from ignorance, but from over- 
cultivation. Much that is new to us is old to 
them. One nation cannot know another as a 
nation knows itself, and unless the few who do 



CONCLUSION 523 

tnow other nations are heeded when they ad- 
vise, the suburban sages, by their stiflP self- 
satisfaction and their profound ignorance of, 
and contempt for, any basis for society except 
their own, may make amicable relations dif- 
ficult. The ultimate decision, even of great 
questions of international policy, is in the hands 
of the voters in the West. The overwhelming 
majority of these know nothing of history, and 
have no historical perspective; they know noth- 
ing of the traditions and prejudices of the East, 
they are contented with the sheltered snobbery of 
suburban sectarianism, and they are, to a man, 
persuaded, as a consequence of this, that any 
civilization other than their own is unworthy even 
of investigation. 

The difference between the way in which 
Western peoples as a whole represent the East 
to themselves, and the real East, is much like 
the difference between the "Faust" of Gounod 
and the real "Faust" of Goethe. The one is 
melodrama for the mob, the other is philosophy 
understood by a small minority. The one is all 
tears and terror and namby-pamby morality, 
gesticulated and shrieked by an obese soprano, 
with a traditional braid of straw-colored hair 
down her back, and a bulky tenor; the other is 
a subtle analysis of the most puzzling contradic- 



5U THE WEST IN THE EAST 

tions in human life. In the one the devil, all in 
red, with hoofs and horns and tail all plainly 
showing, is a silly tempter, invented by a cos- 
tume-maker; in the other, Mephistopheles is a 
shadowy metaphysical creation, who remains to 
this day one of the unsolved mysteries of litera- 
ture. The West pictures the East as an easily 
understood Marguerite; only a few know that 
the East is Faust. 

There was no danger in this attitude in the 
past — unless it be always dangerous to be a com- 
placent fool — because we were too strong to be 
punished for our folly. Our self-righteous in- 
eptitude was safe. This is no longer the case. 
I am no believer in the folly of the day that Japan 
proposes to attack us immediately; but I can 
assure my countrymen that we should have a job 
on our hands which would tax us to the utmost, 
did we undertake to punish Japan for a slight to 
our dignity. In a word, the relations between 
East and West have changed. 

Hitherto the Eastern problem for the white 
races has been merely a consideration of how 
much territory they would take; how much in- 
demnity they would demand ; how much of their 
ethical code and religious preferences they would 
impose; and what demands they would make 
for the commercial and industrial security and 



CONCLUSION m5 

activities of men of their own race in the East. 
Now the problem is slowly shaping itself to mean : 
how much must we give in return for what we 
take; and how can we arrange matters to keep 
the East out of the West, while at the same time 
securing free access for the West in the East. 

We in America, for example, declare that the 
whole southern half of the western hemisphere, 
an enormous tract of valuable land, thinly popu- 
lated, is within our sphere of influence, and not 
open to Chinese, Indian, or Japanese settlers; 
at the same time we ridicule the Ulk of war. 
Can anything be more deplorably self-satisfied, 
ignorant and illogical! Even that most peace- 
able of men, George Herbert, knew, and wrote: 
"You cannot get beyond danger without danger." 
I am not a pleader nor an advocate. I have 
attempted in this volume merely to give material 
for a readjustment of our views of the East; but 
I defy any American to show me how we can 
get beyond the danger of the Monroe Doctrine, 
how we can get beyond the dangers of persistent, 
and often aggravating, attempts to impose our re- 
ligious and moral codes upon an indifferent and 
suspicious Eastern population, without the dan- 
ger of a powerful navy. Not even Yankee in- 
genuity can get beyond danger without danger! 
Our selfish, thoroughly un-Christian and topsy- 



5^6 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

turvy logic, which preaches peace in India, China, 
Japan and Korea, and then proclaims dire pun- 
ishment upon any one who attempts to share in 
the opportunities of the golden West, has gone 
unchallenged thus far, only because we were 
too powerful to be taken to task. But this is 
''exposing the unguarded heel" indeed! 

The almost universal belief in the West, that 
we are admired, envied, and looked upon as 
superior by the East, and that our type of civi- 
lization is the goal toward which the East is 
striving, is not only ludicrously false, but is at 
the bottom of our misunderstanding of the whole 
situation. No Indian prince, no Chinese manda- 
rin, no Korean courtier, no Japanese noble en- 
vies, admires, or looks upon us individually or 
nationally as superior. As for the masses of the 
people, their attitude is a mixture of dislike and 
contempt. 

Do we not see the existing differences between 
Germans and Frenchmen, between the English 
and the Irish; even in our own country, differ- 
ences between the man from New England and 
the man from South Carolina, and the cleavage 
between the negro and the white man.^ Why 
not apply the rules we do know to the peoples 
we do not know ? 

These natural racial antagonisms are planted 



CONCLUSION 527 

in us, for what purpose we know not, and they 
are hard for the best of us to overcome. We 
may have personal friends who are Indian, 
Chinese, Japanese — I now have many, I am 
glad to say — but we should not like our sisters 
and daughters to marry them. Turn this the 
other way, and we have the attitude of the East 
toward the West. Eight hundred millions of 
people in the East either ignore us or suspect us 
and dislike us, and when I write "us" I mean 
the whole West. There are, of course, a minute 
few who speak and understand a European lan- 
guage, and who have travelled, but they are 
least of all converted to our ways or our ideals. 
They admit our superiority in one respect only: 
that we can throw bigger broadsides of lead and 
iron; that we can spend more on gunpowder 
and dynamite ; and that we are better organized, 
martially and commercially, than they are. The 
Japanese war with Russia has led them to believe 
that even this superiority is open to question, 
and passing, not permanent. 

Of our great divisions of peoples, the Russians 
are the most sympathetic to them, the English 
the most respected, the Germans most distrusted 
(particularly in Japan), the Americans the least 
known and considered, in the East. 

British rule in India is the greatest blessing 



528 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

and the most splendid service ever rendered to 
one people by a stranger nation. Unrest is not 
new in India. Many people seem to think that 
there were peace and harmonious interests in 
India before the British took control. The 
readers of these pages will discover this error. 
The continuous unrest of centuries is only now 
whipped anew into froth by a subtle use of re- 
ligious and racial prejudice, in order to stiffen 
the demand of India for the Indians; the real 
meaning of which is India policed by the British, 
for the benefit of the Brahman hierarchy and 
the Babu. 

There are no signs to-day that India can of 
itself throw off or rid itself from British rule. 
That may come, but only through the moral 
and political demoralization of the British at 
home; and a war which will so engage her 
whole strength that she cannot hold India from 
a combined attack from the outside, assisted by 
the Indians inside. Even that calamity would 
only mean India controlled by Russia or Japan, 
or by some arrangement between them for a 
sphere of influence there. India is no more for 
the Indians, than is Korea for the Koreans, for 
ages to come. 

There is greater danger to the present benev- 
olent control of India from London than from 



CONCLUSION 529 

Bengal. If political socialism is to have control, 
with its doctrine broadly stated that all success 
is per se suspect and personal prowess to be re- 
warded with no quarter, then we shall all be 
delivered into the hands of the Yellow Peril and 
the Brown Peril. 

I have dealt at some length upon the situation 
and conditions in India, because British predomi- 
nance in the East is, after all, our first Eastern 
question. Great Britain saved us from our great- 
est danger in our war with Spain, by declining 
to listen to overtures, made to her by the Euro- 
pean powers, to intervene in behalf of Spain. 
Our lamentable unreadiness and blundering, 
were only saved from disaster by the weakness 
of our foe. Had Europe demanded that we 
cease firing and submit the matter at issue to an 
European court, we would have been as impo- 
tent to refuse such an order as was Japan after 
her war with China, when all the spoils were 
taken from her. 

Japan learned her lesson, and in ten years 
made herself strong enough on land and sea to 
take again, and to keep, the Liao-tung peninsula 
and southern Manchuria. For years to come, 
even at the breakneck speed she is working 
now, the control, settlement, and exploitation of 
this new territory will absorb all her energies. 



530 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

Nothing but some almost unthinkable affront to 
her dignity from our unwary national ignorance 
can divert her attention to us. She has nothing 
to fear from us. She is beating us out in the 
race for the Pacific carrying trade, and she will 
soon have all the machinery for a similar suprem- 
acy in China. I am not a believer in the per- 
manent achievements and control of any Eastern 
race ; and I find no arguments except of a hypo- 
thetical sort to bolster up, much less to prove, 
such a thesis; but I am bound to admit that 
Japan, whether permanently or not, has become 
a factor to be considered in all international 
problems of the day. 

China is far more puzzling than either India 
or Japan. The Chinese are the independent, 
virile, and mentally superior race in all the East. 
To the Westerner it is inconceivable that power 
should not wish to express itself, that ability 
should not wish to proclaim itself, that force 
should not wish to stamp its will on others. It 
is just because the Chinese are the most Ori- 
ental of the Orientals, the stanchest believers 
in themselves, that this fitness to prevail, and 
this inertia, exist side by side. 

The East is spiritual, the West secular. The 
East still obeys spiritual beliefs, the West obeys 
only so far as it is convenient and consistent 



CONCLUSION 531 

with personal independence and comfort. In 
the West secular law is above the Church, in 
the East spiritual faith is above the law. The 
West looks forward to personal consciousness 
even after death, as witnessed by our belief in 
immortality; the East seeks loss of conscious- 
ness, and looks upon reincarnations as punish- 
ments. The East abhors impersonal law and 
its cold neutrality, and loves personal autocratic 
rule. Most of the best things of the West — 
honesty, justice, mercy, impartiality and sym- 
pathy — the East dislikes, and would rather be 
without. 

The East is fatigued and disgusted by the 
rules, demands, exigencies of the social inter- 
course of the West. To be on time, to answer 
letters, to pay visits, to dress at certain times, and 
in a certain manner, to be severely accurate in 
money matters, to do day after day certain pre- 
scribed duties, the Oriental shrinks from as from 
slavery; and even though persistent painstaking 
bring prosperity, he will not drive himself that 
far. This accounts for the fact that the East 
submits to cruelty, to conquest, flood, and famine, 
to being trampled to death by elephants, buried 
alive in a wall, cut to pieces while alive, and to 
infanticide on a colossal scale. He will exert 
himself tremendously on occasion, he will fasten 



532 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

his will upon some object of vengeance or pos- 
session, and hang on till death; but he must be 
free to choose his own time and place. Regu- 
larity seems to him, of all things, the worst 
tyranny. His patience is monumental, because 
his whole creed and philosophy of life teach 
that what he wants must come, and that it is 
better to wait for it than to strive for it. I be- 
lieve the power of accomplishment throughout 
the East, and particularly in China, is tremen- 
dous ; but they will not exercise it at the cost of 
mechanical persistence. Symptoms of a similar 
kind we find in our own race. Men capable of 
the most tremendous mental and moral labor 
seem to be mentally and physically torpid at 
times. They shrink from any exertion w^hatever 
as from pain. I see no signs that these broad 
differences are lessening. Japan whipped into 
exertion by maltreatment has armed herself, but 
even Japan rests what she has accomplished 
upon quite other moral and religious sanctions 
than ours. 

What, then, is to be our attitude; what the re- 
sults of the increasing intercourse betw^een West 
and East? Either the English and the Ameri- 
cans, to speak only of our own case, believe their 
own civilization is superior to that of the people 
they govern, and that therefore they have a 



CONCLUSION 533 

righteous cause in keeping them subordinate, 
or they are mere plunderers. If they have this 
faith they are bound to defend themselves from 
Indian, Japanese, or any other civilization that 
they consider dangerous to their own, whether 
in their dependencies or at home. 

We should not boast nor bluster; nor should 
we seek peace by hanging the halter of defence- 
lessness about our necks, with the end dangling, 
as an invitation to pull us into war. We may 
maintain our preferences at home, but we may 
not enforce our prejudices abroad, is about the 
stage at which we have arrived. Internationally, 
we must now live "answerable lives," not only 
because the East is growing powerful enough to 
demand answers, but because as our knowledge 
of other peoples increases by speedier means of 
intercourse, sympathy ought to increase as well. 

No successful imperialism is possible to a 
nation of men who are without charity, without 
toleration and without recognition of their own 
ignorance and limitations. They must strive 
for an intellectual magnanimity, which enables 
them to detect the good in manners, morals, 
governments and beliefs, built upon traditions 
worlds apart from their own. They must not 
be turned aside from the responsibilities of gov- 
erning and protecting the alien races in the de- 



534 THE WEST IN THE EAST 

pendencies they control by that sentimentality 
of the day which twists truth to make traps for 
fools. They must not be led astray by the temp- 
tations to immediate gain and the temporary 
defeat of a commercial rival by the "drummer" 
diplomacy which a selfish industrialism would 
foist upon them. The man who only watches 
his feet is quite as likely to stumble as the man 
who is looking at a distant steeple. The future 
as well as the present, then as much as now, 
must be kept in mind. No nation ever lost 
anything, not even its trade, by holding to high 
ideals, and by insisting upon them for its ser- 
vants. Only thus can the West give a confident 
*'No" to the question being asked in the East: 

**Is civilization a failure. 
And is the Caucasian played out.^" 



M/.r 22 i^U 



